for posterity!
Title: within a shadowed forest
Pairings/Characters: Most of the main cast makes an appearance, along with several minor characters and OCs. The only completely visible pairing is Anathema/Newt, but there are also hints of Shadwell/Madame Tracy, Adam/Pepper, Brian/Wensleydale, and Aziraphale/Crowley.
Rating: PG-13 for violence.
Summary: AU. Adam… succumbs to his inner Son of Satan, when the time comes. Adam being Adam, this still involves a little rewriting of the Plan.
Warnings: Major character death. And not in the sense of "Death is a major character", although he is that.
A/N: Because there's nothing more festive than a long, bleak story about the last day on Earth. I've strayed a little from the prompt, but I think I kept true to the spirit of it. In addition to Good Omens, I've drawn from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series for everything from throwaway lines to theology, but knowledge of the series isn't necessary to understand this story.
Many thanks to my beta, clodia_metelli. Without you, who knows how this would have ended? Heck, everyone might have lived happily ever after.
We can't be having with that. ♥
IN THE END
There were four children in a quarry, sitting on an old milk crate, and one of them was talking. The other three listened. There was no way they could have avoided listening to him, in that moment, though the air in the quarry felt like a knife held just against the skin, and lightning ripped apart the sky overhead.
It was coming on 8 p.m. It had not been a nice day.
“I’ve got some more friends coming,” Adam was saying. “They’ll be here soon, and then we can really get started.”
And, as it happens, you know how this story went. But the trouble with this story, as with all stories, is that they change when you look away.
So look. Look back.
Look at Pepper, who had been sitting staring at her knees, and who raised her head, now, eyes bright with the kind of anger that is really just terror: terror backed up into a corner and seeing, all too clearly, how the future will go. She had had something else on her mind, but…
“Other friends?” she said, indignantly. “We’re your friends.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. He crossed his arms. “We’ve always been your friends. Since forever an’ ever ago.”
“You’ve never needed other friends before,” said Wensleydale, pushing his spectacles up higher; they kept slipping down the bridge of his nose, because of the sheen of perspiration developing there. “Don’t see why you need ‘em now.”
“What?” said Adam.
The Them drew closer together, unconsciously. They wore identical expressions under freckles, glasses and grime.
“Seems to me,” said Pepper, “seems to me, if we’re goin’ to cut up the world, we ought to do it ourselves.”
“All for one,” murmured Wensleydale.
“An’ all that sort of thing,” finished Brian, grandly.
“I--”
Adam hesitated. The world, spinning, slowed on its axis.
This might conceivably have been a side effect of what was happening to the moon, which was being packed up early-- the archangel Gabriel liked to think of himself as a forward planner[1] and had released uncounted memos over the millennia to make sure that everyone else thought of him that way too. But probably it was the significance of the moment that was responsible. No one was paying much attention to gravity at this stage in the game.
Weightless, then, the planet waited: its future hanging, not on any golden string, but on a word.
[1] In this, he was unusual among his brethren: most angels preferred to rain fire first and explain its importance to the Plan after. A healthy supply of backward Planners is an essential part of any really impressive bureaucracy, and Heaven is no exception to the rule. It never is[2].
[2] Except possibly for “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”
It has been observed, by a more illustrious pair of narrators than the current, that people are fundamentally people. It has been said, too, that this can serve to explain most of the major events which, when lined up just so, make history.
This is not history. In this moment, here and now, with people being what they are… anything could happen. That’s the whole point.
The point of points, though, is that they are sharp. When practically applied, they almost always hurt. And as a rule the really religious prefer voodoo to acupuncture.
Somewhere, an angel is telling America, It won’t be like that at all. Not really.
He’s right, as it happens. He’s always right about that. Every single time[1].
[1] Except in the version of this universe that formed in St. John of Patmos’ head after a particularly bad batch of mushrooms, and stayed around just long enough to get written down. But that doesn’t count. That’s not very impressive, as a lifespan for a whole universe. The mushrooms stayed around for longer.
“You’re right,” said Adam, slowly.
The Them breathed in. The world whirled.
“You’re right,” Adam said, with more assurance.
He slid off the milk crate, and stood. The ground shook a little under his trainers, but the Them didn’t hold that against it; they would have done the same, in its place.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Together. We’ll do it. We’ll do it ourselves.”
There was a silence. It was expectant on Adam’s part and mystified on everyone else’s, which division had the advantage of being familiar, at least.
“Go where?” said Brian, at last.
“The air base, of course, ” Adam said. In the strangeness of the light, his face looked almost human as he smiled.
The Them did not meet one another’s eyes.
“Come on,” he told them. “We’ve got to beat the rush. You’d better go an’ get your bikes, I think. And then we’ll see.”
Index cards went everywhere, like startled birds, although they did not evacuate their bowels before fluttering away. “I’ll never be able to sort them out now,” Anathema said.
“You don’t have to,” said Newt manically. “Just pick one. Any one. It won’t matter.”
And Newt too was right. Anathema gave him an impatient look and went back to rummaging through the mess under her seat, but every word he’d just uttered was both nice and accurate. However little it would have comforted him to know it.
The Them biked in silence.
Actually, they biked in a bubble of small sounds, like the persistent rattling of Pepper’s bike (incognito[1]); and the yapping of Dog, whose nerves were all over the place[2]. But no one said anything. A casual observer would have had to beat off the things unsaid with a stick.
There were no casual observers. R.P. Tyler was still half a mile and two plastic baggies away, as yet, and the Them biked past a certain fallen signpost entirely unbothered by other people.
Adam pulled up a little way from the base. The others stopped when he did, whether or not they’d been quick enough to brake in time.
“What’re we stopping for?” said Pepper, with one foot still on a pedal.
“We’ve can’t take these with us,” said Adam, waving a hand at the bikes. “Someone might notice.”
The Them weren’t sure why Adam would care about someone noticing, but they did as they were told. They were feeling better, now. He was their leader. He was leading them, and only them, which was right. It was practically like old days, especially when his back was to them.
They reached the gate. Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger, who had been having a good if unexciting day up till then, gave them a professional once-over. “Hey--” he began.
“Sleep,” said Adam.
Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger dropped to the ground slowly. He was a tall man, and there was a lot of him to drop. When he was a uniformed heap on the tarmac, Adam hopped over his out-flung arm, and headed in, towards one of the buildings, and the Them followed.
They walked in real silence, now. Adam didn’t believe in alarms[3].
[1] That is, with sheets of cardboard attached to the unacceptably girly bits.
[2] Literally. The senses of a hellhound go a long way, though only in one direction.
[3] The smoke detectors in the Young household had been nonfunctional for about six months. The alarm clocks had been nonfunctional since almost a month before Adam was born, a thorough understanding of cause and effect never having been one of Adam’s strengths.
Sgt. Deisenburger had a very nice sleep, and dreamed of the things he liked best.
He did not wake up even when War nudged him in the side with the glossy toe of her boot. This was an event unprecedented in War’s six thousand years of experience, and she viewed it with interest and concern. She was about to take further steps[1], when Death said, DO NOT BOTHER.
“Sorry?”
HE DID THIS, said Death.
“He-- oh.”
YES.
“Is there some kind of roundabout that doesn’t get to me?” asked Famine.
“The Antichrist,” said Pollution, not unkindly, “has arrived.”
Famine frowned. “But that’s not how it goes,“ he said. “We’re supposed to come first, and set everything in motion, and then he--”
PLANS CHANGE, said Death.
“Not these plans.”
Death did not answer immediately. He walked around Sgt. Deisenburger’s outflung arm and the fine dry dust did not rise from under his heels. When he did speak, it was to say, very finally:
HE IS HERE.
[1] Onto Sgt. Deisenburger’s prone body, if at all possible.
“What’re we waiting for?” said Pepper.
“We need some things,” said Adam. “A sword, and some scales, and a crown.”
“Where’re we supposed to get those?” Brian asked.
“There,” said Adam, pointing.
“Where?” said War.
COME, said Death, AND SEE.
Around the horizon, clouds unspooled like yarn. The circle of sun directly above turned their roiling threads to gold.
The Them watched as the Four approached.
They looked, Pepper thought, quite human, for nightmares. The woman’s hair burned the eye, but the Them were used to that: they were jaded veterans of the Bottled Dye Wars[1], and had, among other things, watched Adam’s older sister Sarah go through an entire spectrum of hair colours ranging from red[2] to redder[4] when she was fifteen. Unlike Sarah, the woman wore her hair, not the other way around, but it was still… recognisable. In a way. And the man in the suit looked a bit like one of Wensleydale’s father’s coworkers, and the young man with the glazed-over eyes would have fit right in on one of the posters at school, with “COMING OUT IN THEATRES THIS JANUARY” printed large on the bottom, or, alternatively, “DRUGS: JUST SAY NO”.
As for the skeleton, the one in the biology classroom was scarier; it had eyeballs, for one thing.
“Get ready,” Adam whispered to the Them. “You know what to do.”
They nodded, grimly. They knew what to do.
[1] The casualties were mainly shower caps, although the kitchen sink would bear battle scars to the end of its days.
[2] Alias ‘Rich Pale Mahogany With A Hint Of Blackberry’ [3].
[3] The marketers believed in taking inspiration where they found it, even if that was in a wine bottle, or, more frequently, on the label on the wine bottle’s slightly sticky side, during the morning after they’d conspicuously missed that deadline.
[4] Alias ‘Dark Glossy Burgundy #1971, And What A Good Year That Was, Too’.
R.P. Tyler went by the Youngs’ house every day for his evening constitutional; and in at least one way this day was no different from any other.
“Evening, Young,” he called out to Mr. Young, who was smoking on the deck.
Mr. Young gave him a calm look that revealed just enough irritation at this form of address to convey his real feelings, in much the same way the flash of a piranha’s fin in dark water can say more than the entire fish leaping out to bite your face, not least because, while biting your face, its mouth is too full to talk.
“Evening,” he said, blowing a ring.
R.P. Tyler, who had had a rather nice walk, and who had gotten to give three separate sets of directions-- one to some motorcyclists, one to a young man whose car had been on fire, and one to a ventriloquist-- decided to let this pass. He was in a good mood. He’d already decided that the car couldn’t have been on fire, not really, and that it was all down the unhealthy excesses of youth.
He tromped onward. Shutzi snuffled after.
Mr. Young sent another ring rising through the first one, and leaned back, in his chair.
In both of the skull’s sockets, something bright flared.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, said Death.
“You don’t have to,” said Adam, his smile sweet.
They stared at each other: the boy and Death. The dark under the cowl reflected in Adam’s pupils, and the blue of his eyes was there in Death’s, burning at the bottom of the dark.
“Now,” Adam said.
Neither he nor Death looked up when War screamed, though for once her voice had no metallic overtones. It was just a scream.
“Take it, Pepper,” Adam said.
Neither looked up when Famine said, “No--”
“Yes,” Adam said.
And neither looked up when Pollution ran, his shoes scraping earth.
“Go on,” Adam said.
Brian had Adam’s voice in his ears. He ran faster.
When, after a time, Pollution began to weep, Death’s head turned as though dragged. The Three were huddled behind him now, in utter disarray: hands empty and heads bare, twitching with wordless shock.
He swept around again in time to see the Them arrange themselves at Adam’s back in a defensive square. They looked strangely impressive. The stolen silver overwhelmed the fact of their size, the cartoon designs on their T-shirts, their uncertainty: its glow was in every square inch of their skin.
Adam said, “You’ve got to do what I say, now.”
I AM AZRAEL, said Death. I AM NOT LIKE THEM. YOU CANNOT OUTSOURCE MY JOB.
He straightened, slowly. Wings opened out of his robe in a flare of black, like the first burst of colour as a droplet of ink hits water.
And far above, in the fullness of the sky, invisible pinions tightened sympathetically as his unrolled. The ranks of Heaven and Hell felt the wind begin to blow, harder than before.
“I know you aren’t,” said Adam. “That’s why you’ve got to do what I say.”
A pause. Death grinned.
I HAVE WAITED FOR THIS A LONG TIME, ADAM YOUNG, he said. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.
“I know,” Adam repeated. “You think I don’t know?”
Death said nothing.
There was a commotion coming from the gates. Adam, more interested in the commotion that wasn’t coming from the sky, tilted his head back. It no longer took much to make out the details of the assembled armies. They had no real volume, but they occupied the space in spite of it, their eagerness distorting the light.
“This is what’s goin’ to happen,” he told the Them. “Brian, when I say go, you throw that crown up, just as hard as you can. Wensley--” He thought for a bit. “Wensley, you c’n swing the scales, so they spin.”
He thought for a bit more. “And Pepper?”
“Huh?” said Pepper, who had been watching the fuss that was taking place at the gate, where a middle-aged woman and a shapeless little figure wrapped in plaid and a man in sunglasses were getting out of a van.
“You stick that in the ground,” said Adam. “You stick it good.”
“Oh,” she said, distantly. “Yes.”
LEAVE NOW, said Death, to the Three.
“This isn’t what we were promised,” hissed War.
NO, Death agreed.
Light glinted off bone in a suspiciously humourous fashion. War wavered for a moment, then spat blood and stalked off.
“This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this,” said Famine, coldly, wiping his hands on his tailored suit, which showed the stains, for once, like dark mouths opening in the weave of the fabric.
I’M SURE, said Death. Famine limped away.
Pollution, though, didn’t look well. Certainly not well enough for locomotion.
“You…” he moaned.
I, said Death, as gently as was possible in a voice like the falling of stone on stone.
“Now,” Adam said.
In the end, the Them did what they were told.
There should have been sound effects, there at the last. But there was only the music of silver. Silver and air and silver and silver and silver and old stone; and Adam, hands agleam.
If you took the world away and just left the electricity-- well, you’d never get anything really interesting done.
So Adam, considerately, took away the electricity. And he took away the poisons, and he took away the cities, and he took away the walls; and in their place he put things right.
It helped, of course, that by then matters was already in motion. Take the Kappamaki, for instance, along with all the whaling ships like it, floating bemused on a winedark sea. Just as the sword’s tip broke the crust of the hard-packed dirt, the kraken broke the surface of the water.
Matters moved. There was, very shortly afterward, no trace of boat left, except in the contented gleam of the kraken’s open mouth.
In its wake Adam put live whales, thinking of Anathema. He remembered who his friends were, after all.
Anathema was crouching by the hole in the fence, her arms shielding her head. Newt held onto her. He pressed his nose against her shoulder, his glasses skewing in the process, until all he could see was blurred brilliance coming in around the edge of her neck. She was crying, he realised.
The soldier who was supposed to be guarding the hole sat down next to them. “Get a room,” he suggested, not unkindly, and added, “We could all do with a room, a time like this.”
“It’s over,” Anathema kept saying. She had index cards clamped down between her fingers and her plaster-dusted hair like a veil. Married to her work, Newt thought, and had a horrible urge to laugh.
The wind was rising.
“It’s all over.”
But it wasn’t, yet, Newt almost replied. That was the worst thing. They’d come too late, but that didn’t mean it was over. That just meant they were getting front row seats.
He didn’t say it. Her eyes were terribly green.
And green…
…spread over the Earth, seeping into places it had not touched for millennia. From space, the planet looked now like a fire opal at some unseen dancer’s throat, colour slithering in clear dark depths as it wheeled across the night.
The deserts flowered; and in the rainforests, flowers began to seek out dessert. Preferably raw.
The green spread. Under it, people died, vanished, climbed: not always in that order.
Adam listened, and when he was satisfied with the lush quality of quiet, he moved on. There was a lot of Earth, he thought. It was a good thing he was there, finally, to take care of it.
Now consider the Them, who had, to a one, made their choice.
Brian had one hand stretched toward the sky, his short, compact body lifting as if pulled up by a single string, hooked in his palm. The crown, thrown, dangled overhead at the summit of its arc. Wensleydale, to his left, was watching in fascination as the fine chains of the scales wrapped around, and around, and around.
Pepper was on one knee. Her eyes were closed. Her knuckles were white.
There were other people, there: the unlikely party from the van and, forming rapidly in the background, two men of fire. But the Them composed the foreground. And Adam, of course, was the focal point.
He glanced over his shoulder at the gathering adults, who wanted to interrupt. Who thought that they could change what was happening by talking. To him. About his father. He looked down, and then up. His face took on an expression of mild disgust.
There was a moment of conflict. But Adam was on his own ground. It was his ground. He’d made it so.
His hand moved in a blurred half circle.
There was light.
ELEVEN MINUTES AGO
Crowley closed his eyes when the light started, but he didn’t get a chance to open them again because the next thing he knew he was in Hell, where eyelids are frowned upon. Often from great heights. At least, he thought it was Hell. There was a shadow taking up most of his view.
Crowley squinted at it. The shadow, helpfully, resolved itself into a Duke of Hell.
Well. That settled that, and also quite a few other questions his brain had been lining up, like, ‘am I going to get out of this in one piece?’ and ‘will there be grapes?’
“Hello, Crawly,” said Hastur.
“Hi,” said Crowley. He felt very calm. It was probably some kind of flash of prophetic insight he was having. Probably sheerest oblivion was quite a calm state to be in, he reasoned, and probably he’d get there eventually, after a few longish eternities of pain.
“You’re in trouble, Crawly,” said Hastur. He did not smile.
“Really?” said Crowley brightly.
“This way,” the duke growled, and took him by the memory of a shoulder.
With less ado than he might have liked, Crowley found himself being marched deeper into the Pit.
“Aziraphale,” said the Metatron, “you have strayed.”
“Really,” said Aziraphale. He made a game attempt to sit up, but possessing people always left his ectoplasm confused and he ended up just wobbling into a more vertical pile of angelic presence on the Metatron’s office’s otherwise immaculate carpet.
“Yes,” said the Metatron, little tongues of flame snapping off its face.
Aziraphale nodded.
“What exactly… just happened?” he asked.
The Metatron sniffed.
“We are looking into it,” it said. “But as for you…”
Its mouth curved upward. The smile was not unpleasant: it was simply the smile of a bad job well brushed under the rug.
“See for yourself,” it said.
Crowley stared at the light. It cut through the dark ceiling of Dis and reached down to the ground in a flawless white column.
“What,” he said.
“Yeah,” agreed Hastur, grudgingly. “’s’not natural.”
“I-- no,” said Crowley. “Um. Is that--”
Hastur did smile, then.
“You lucky bastard,” he said, “you’re getting your old job back.”
“Oh, no,” said Crowley.
“Oh, yes,” said Hastur.
“Oh, no,” said Crowley.
“Oh, y-- for crying out loud, have a little self respect, why don’t you.”
He punctuated this kind advice with a push.
“Oh, noooooooooo,” said Crowley, stumbling, and--
Schloop, went the light.
“Sorry?” said Aziraphale. “You’re what?”
“Giving you your job back,” said the Metatron, calmly.
“But you said--”
“Second chances are policy,” said the Metatron.
It pressed a button. A wall slid back, and the light poured in. Aziraphale began to tremble as only a morphically confused mass of spiritual essence can.
“We look forward to your report,” said the Metatron, in a way that did not invite further questions.
Aziraphale, for want of any more palatable options and, indeed, any options at all, went to the light. The Metatron’s blank gaze followed him all the way across the floor.
Schloop.
The Metatron cocked its head to one side.
“Curious,” it said.
Then it went back to the paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork on its desk, and there would be more. Very shortly.
SUNDAY
(The rest of their lives.)
It was a day.
It would have been impossible to say whether it was a nice one or not, because the forest canopy was a solid mass overhead, a second firmament: but it was certainly a day of some kind, because Aziraphale could hear birds singing, somewhere.
He also heard a voice say, from the general vicinity of his foot, "Well, that one went down like a lead balloon."
"Sorry?" he said, taking a wary step backward.
A sleek triangular head rose out of the ferny mulch. "I said--" the snake began.
"That's all right, actually," said Aziraphale, holding up a hand. He paused, and added, "Hello, Crowley," and rubbed his eyes.
Crowley snorted in a way that was neither polite nor convincingly serpentine.
“Huh,” he said.
Aziraphale took another step back, and sat down on what he assumed was a log. In a way he was correct-- it hadn’t been up till then, but when an angel assumes something is a log, it’s the loglike object that’s in for a surprise.
“Well,” he said. “Erm. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea… is the War…?”
“The War’s off,” said Crowley. “Or else they’re holding it on the moon, or something. There’s no one here.” He slid over, as he spoke, to coil by Aziraphale’s bare feet.
Aziraphale sniffed. The air in the rainforest was thick with moisture; and it was true that the smell of things growing and rotting and living, unseen and untended, was not a smell that had anything to do with waiting armies.
“What about the humans?” he asked.
Crowley said, bitterly, “What about them?”
“Where did they all go?”
Crowley tried to shrug, and ended up in a sprawl of persistently shoulderless muscle. “Where do humans ever go?”
Neither of them spoke again for a while after that.
Anathema hadn’t gone anywhere. She hadn’t moved once, all through the night. Newt woke-- came to, really-- with her still in his arms.
“Hey,” he said, quietly. And then, louder, “Um. Anathema?”
“Looks to me like nobody’s home,” drawled the ex-guard. The hole and the fence both having vanished long since, he’d declared himself off-duty, doffed his helmet and lain down in the newly luxuriant bushes, his arms behind his head. He looked quite comfortable, thought Newt enviously. Newt, who could be uncomfortable in a spa and indeed had on multiple occasions broken out in a rash on contact with warm, soothing, herbally infused steam[1], rather thought he would rupture something if he stayed on the ground another minute.
“Rise and shine,” he suggested to Anathema, hopefully. She didn’t stir.
“She was crazy,” said the ex-guard. “Didn’t you hear her? Screaming like a fuckin’ banshee.”
“Shut up,” said Newt.
The ex-guard started to say something, but Newt didn’t hear what, because then Anathema stood up, dragging Newt with her as she unfolded.
He untangled himself hastily. She shook her head, as if to clear it, and looked around.
“Where are we?”
“The airbase,” said Newt.
Anathema said, “This isn’t the airbase.”
“Well, it was,” said Newt, a little irritated. “The trees are new.”
Anathema walked past him to the edge of the clearing, and laid a hand on one of the new trees, which had gleaming, leathery bark and a lacy beard of strange crisp lichens.
“Uh,” said Newt, “touching that is probably--”
“Agnes didn’t write this,” said Anathema.
“Yes, well--”
“Who?” said the ex-guard.
“We’re still here,” she said.
“Yes, I know--”
“Who’s this Agnes?” demanded the ex-guard, propping himself up on his elbow. “Are you lot journalists?”
“No, but we know a lot about the newspaper business,” Newt said, under his breath.
“She was my great-great-great-to-the-umpteenth-grandmother,” said Anathema, briskly. “She foretold all this, except for the parts she didn’t.”
The ex-guard considered this. Newt closed his eyes.
“I’ve got an aunt who’s like that,” said the ex-guard, after a pause. “’specially after two gins.”
“Yes,” said Anathema, “probably.”
She gave him a brilliant smile, and then, when he began to smile uncertainly back, hit him over the head with a stick, quite hard. And it occurred to Newt, watching, that she must have been holding the stick the whole time. The whole night through.
He wondered what she'd intended to use it for before.
The ex-guard yelped and toppled sideways wearing a surprised expression. Newt waited for his eyes to roll up in his head, like in the movies, but all that happened was a steady stream of profanity.
“…the hell did you do that for?” he moaned, clutching his skull.
“This,” said Anathema smartly, pulling the gun out of the man’s other, unresisting hand. “Let’s go,” she told Newt.
“Absolutely,” said Newt, staring at the guard, who was still conscious, and had begun to cry softly, and looked like he would shortly regain the hand-eye coordination necessary to punch someone. “no problem, whatever you want--”
Anathema took his hand.
“…oh,” said Newt.
“Let’s go now,” Anathema said. She hefted the gun. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
“For what, exactly?” Newt asked. “I could probably use it to prop up a stool, or, or beautify a mantelpiece--”
Her mouth tasted like mouths generally do before their owners have brushed their teeth. Newt leaned into the kiss, and felt the dampness on her face transfer to his, and wondered what it meant to be so unbearably happy on this morning, of all the mornings he had ever known.
There was vivid moss clinging to her hair, he noticed. And in her open eyes he could just about make out the alien twists of the forest, behind them.
He breathed in.
[1] Newt was not allergic to any one plant species and his reaction to the spa’s atmospheric elements had mystified the doctors he’d seen about it. Newt suspected that what he was really allergic to was aromatherapy, but he’d never told anyone that, for fear of being thought odd.
Elsewhere in what had been the airbase, the Them stirred, as statues do in charmingly illustrated yet subtly horrifying children’s stories after the people have all gone from the public squares.
“Pepper? Wensleydale? Brian?”
They blinked at him owlishly.
“I want to show you all something,” said Adam. “One at a time.”
He smiled, almost shyly. He looked very young.
“Who wants to go first?”
“Me,” blurted Brian.
The other two stared at him. “I want to,” he said, defiantly.
And then, without any special effects, he rose into the air.
When he realised what was happening he began to flail like a boy possessed, which in the most technical sense of term, he was; but by then he was barely more than a grubby dot in the blue heavens. Adam went at a more leisurely pace, arms stretched out in front of him like a superhero’s. There was something cartoonish about his upraised face, too; the brightness of morning simplified his features, and drew straight lines of shade over his skin, at least while he was still close enough to appear to have skin at all.
Pepper’s sword made a scraping sound when she wrenched it out of the Earth.
“D’you think he’ll be all right?” she said.
“Who?” asked Wensleydale, tiredly.
Pepper bit her lip.
“You all right?” Adam said.
“I’m feelin’ just fine,” said Brian, firmly. His face was clean, for once, washed pale by cold sweat over the course of the night and, subsequently, the flight. His usual light furring of dirt had been dragged down by the slide of water, and was drying on the underside of his jaw.
Adam looked doubtfully at him. “Well,” he said, nodding to what lay far too far below, “that’s Africa.”
It was.
“Gosh,” said Brian, and tried very hard not to throw up.
Adam clapped him on the back in a way that Adam had never done before.
“It’ll be great,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Brian nodded slightly. He’d taken to moving his head by very small degrees to minimize sloshing, in the past hour.
He was going, he thought, to be sick.
According to Pepper, Wensleydale was next. Wensleydale didn’t quite see how she’d reached that conclusion when she told him so, but when she pushed him forward the instant Adam and Brian returned, then he got it.
He also got America. He didn’t like America much, either.
He especially didn’t like America from miles and miles up: but that was where he was. He was miles above America. He was also floating comfortably in a nimbus of blue, and that would have been great, only he had a suspicion that the instant Adam got distracted he’d be falling from miles above America in a nimbus of red. On the whole, Wensleydale had had better Sundays, down to and including the ones with all his aunts in.
“That bit’s yours,” said Adam, softly, his fingertip describing the curl of the continent laid out below.
It's just a lot of dirt, Wensleydale thought, with some clarity. The people are... are hiding... and what's mine is dirt and trees and big, hungry animals and probably no flavours of ice cream at all.
Adam was looking at him.
“Thank you,” said Wensleydale, politely.
“'Welcome,” said Adam, and starlight, unsoftened by much intermediary air, flashed off his teeth as he grinned.
And:
“It’s bigger than I expected it to be,” said Pepper, a shade critically.
“It’s the biggest continent,” said Adam. “By-- by lots.”
“Huh,” said Pepper.
“There’s room here for anything you want,” said Adam.
Pepper twisted onto her back, until she was looking up at the blackness of space.
“Yeah,” she said. “I expect.”
“This is England, isn’t it,” said Crowley.
“Probably,” said Aziraphale, and, “Was.”
“We could…”
“Yes?”
Crowley stared at nothing.
Actually, he stared at a chameleon that had emerged from a profusion of glistening leaves. It had spines, and it was as tastelessly green as the foliage, and the skin of its flanks looked almost glassy. He hadn’t seen one like it since the day it’d been named.
“We could go back to Lower Tadfield,” he said.
“Walk there, d’you mean?” said Aziraphale.
Crowley hissed. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually,” said the angel, coldly. “What are we supposed to do once we’re there? Admire the gardens?”
“I don’t think there are any gardens left,” said Crowley. The chameleon had vanished, quick as the curl of light on the leaves it left shuddering in its wake.
Aziraphale made an exasperated sound. “We haven’t--”
“--anything better to do,” Crowley finished, smoothly. “Listen, I’m not saying… let’s just go look, all right? We can go and see. Find a river, or something, an open space where you can fly up, and… look.”
“Charming,” said the angel. But he got off the log[1].
Crowley took the opportunity to attach himself to his leg.
“I say--” said the angel.
“It’s practical! It’s practical!” said Crowley.
“Practical,” said Aziraphale, “would be you shedding the silly snakesuit and--”
“I can’t.”
Aziraphale raised an eyebrow.
“Really,” said Crowley. “You think I’d still be on my belly if I had any better options?”
“You’re not on your belly,” said Aziraphale, “just now. More’s the pity.”
His eyes glinted dangerously. This did not escape Crowley, who decided he was going to magnanimously overlook the angel’s rudeness, for the time being.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said. “Otherwise one or the other of us won’t be able to keep up, and I’m not entirely sure which, don’t look at me like that, snakes are lithe, and we want to stick together, don’t we?”
Aziraphale stared at his ensnared ankle.
“I think so,” he said, “but at the moment I’m hard-pressed to recall why.”
Crowley smiled like a human. This was quite a feat.
“The Arrangement’s not over,” he said.
“It was never meant to last past Armageddon,” Aziraphale said.
“No,” said Crowley. “It was never meant to last past the end of the world. The world’s not gone, exactly, is it.”
Aziraphale harrumphed. But he didn’t argue, Crowley noticed, and after another moment he began to pick his way toward the sound of running water, not far off.
[1] Which promptly resumed its interrupted career as an alligator[2]. It waited until the two-legged food and, more importantly, the two-legged food’s bottom had wandered off into the woods before moving, however. It had too many splinters for its liking as it was.
[2] Though ever after, it would feel the occasional urge to float around in the mud and do nothing. Since it was an alligator, this did not result in any noticeable change in its behavioral patterns.
The Them regrouped in the quarry, which looked exactly like it had yesterday.
“Let’s have a war,” said Adam.
There was a silence.
“Who with?” Brian asked, eventually.
Adam gave this due consideration for all of a sixth of a second.
“It’ll be us,” he said firmly. “Me and Pepper against you and Wensley.”
“Oh,” said Wensleydale. Pepper elbowed him in the ribs and jerked her head urgently at Brian, so he added, with false heartiness, “Sounds brilliant.”
“’Course it does,” said Adam. “Land or sea?”
“What?” said Wensleydale, who’d been distracted by all the liquids that seemed to be oozing from unexpected orifices in Brian’s face. They were all subject to regular colds, except Adam[1], but this was worrying even by the Them’s standards.
“Land,” said Adam patiently, “or sea.”
“Uh,” said Wensleydale.
“Land,” said Pepper.
They looked at her.
“We c’n have it on my territory, because Asia’s biggest,” she went on. Her hands, they saw, were folded neatly in her lap.
“That’s set, then,” said Adam.
The sun glowed on Pepper’s disintegrating braids. The quarry seemed very warm and small, after having touched the chilly edge of the sky, and the light was soft and buttery, except in the tangles of Pepper’s hair, where it developed the faintly overconfident quality of the shine you get on polished metal.
They kept looking at her. Adam, blinking, raised a hand toward her tense face.
[1] Who’d got colds on beautiful spring days where it’d be practic’ly inhuman, anyway, to keep a growin’ boy shut up in a classroom, back when there were classrooms, and who thought of thermometers as natural accomplices in crime.
The world changed.
Again.
“Welcome to China,” Adam said, rather impressively, when the Them had uncurled from trembling fetal positions. “You can be here, and we’ll be in Russia, and the troops can meet in the middle, see?”
“Brilliant,” repeated Wensleydale, nervously. Beside him, Brian threw up.
The vomit steamed away the instant it hit stone. They were standing on a part of the Great Wall that had never been open to tourists, and vomit would have ruined the view, but it still frightened Wensleydale to see the bile turn to vapour, just like that.
Just like that, Adam touched two fingers to the center of his forehead. It hurt.
“Now,” he said, “just think of what kinds of soldiers you’d like, that’s all, and where you want them to go. They’ll do it.”
He turned to Brian, and Brian backed away, gasping. Adam didn’t seem to notice; he was examining the patch of ancient stone where the vomit had, very briefly, been.
“You have to pull yourself together,” Pepper whispered to Brian. She took his elbow and shook him, which struck Wensleydale as astonishingly counterintuitive, even by Pepper’s standards; but it had the desired effect. Brian closed his mouth, at least, and wiped away the dribble on his chin.
Adam scuffed his trainer on the stone to no visible effect. Then he reached out and tapped Brian’s face, a little lower than he’d done it on Wensleydale because, among other things, Brian was nodding a bit.
“Now try,” said Adam. “Both of you.”
“’Scuse me,” said Pepper, with magnificent iciness, “but it seems to me you’ve forgotten someone.”
Adam shook his head. “We can’t make ours until we’re up north. Otherwise how’ll we lay ambushes and have amazin’ tactical manoeuvres?”
“Well… all right,” said Pepper, reluctantly. “But it dun’t seem fair, that they get to start first.”
“Everyone gets a turn,” said Adam.
The Them nodded. That was how it worked. Everyone always got a turn.
Only everyone hadn’t just been… them, up till now.
“Go on,” said Adam.
Wensleydale went to the parapet and leaned over. From there the treetops on the slope were a dense carpet of green.
Feeling rather silly, he shut his eyes and pictured the same slope, but with soldiers in the trees, their helmets rising out of the branches like government-issued fruit.
He opened his eyes.
And gaped, a little.
“This is going to be brilliant,” Adam said, at his back.
Out of the trees rose enormous… humanoid figures. They were slightly transparent, like the shower curtains at home[1], and they had solemn faces that might have come right out of a plastic mould, and they were sitting in the trees, like he’d imagined, only they were using the trees’ bushy crowns like bean bags, and Wensleydale didn’t even think that was possible, structurally speaking, but there they were.
“Coo,” said Brian.
“Wowie,” said Pepper.
Wensleydale wondered whether he was catching whatever Brian had.
One of the huge, helmeted heads turned toward him. The eyes were flat and as camouflaged as the rest of it, and Wensleydale flinched. He could see the raised seam on the side of the face, exactly where it would have been on a toy. They weren’t toys, though.
“You can shrink ‘em,” said Adam, carelessly. “If you like.”
Brian screwed up his nose in thought. The soldiers’ bodies disappeared downward, sinking into the sea of glittering leaves.
The colour of them seemed to concentrate as they contracted, so that by the time it was just their shoulders and heads poking out, they looked almost solid. It wasn’t an improvement.
“What about guns?” Brian asked.
“They’ve got guns,” Pepper said, and it was true; they did have guns, sticking out of their backs. At least, there were tubes with triggers.
“Do they work, though, is the thing,” Brian said. “My uncle has a gun, an’ he said it was awfully complicated, an’ that using one well was like playing an instrument, an’ I was never very good at piano…”
“I was,” Wensleydale pointed out.
“Yeah, but you’ve got, well, glasses,” said Brian, a shade apologetically.
“I saw a film where the sharpshooter wore glasses, an’ he did just fine,” said Pepper. “Glasses probably help, I bet. I bet they make you even--”
“You won’t be using it,” Adam said, in a voice like scissors. He waved at the soldiers, and said, “They will.”
Apparently to punctuate his sentence, one stood on its branch and took aim at a spot a few inches from where Wensleydale’s fingers were curled over the rough outer edge of the parapet.
Wensleydale leapt back just in time to avoid being sprayed with ancient bits of stone.
“That’s a historic monument, that is,” he said accusingly, before he could stop himself.
“There’s not going to be any history anymore,” said Adam. “There’s just us."
He glanced at the hole. "Anyway, I can fix it. I can make it better, if you want.”
Wensleydale opened his mouth, and closed it again.
“Nah,” said Brian, after a quiet minute. “It’s a good hole.”
Adam shrugged. He said, “It’s all the same to me.”
“Hey, Adam, shouldn’t we be in Russia? An’ planning our attack?” said Pepper, meaningfully.
“Sure,” said Adam, turning to her. He drew a doorway in the air between them with one finger, his arm describing impossibly straight lines. The doorway, finished, glistened faintly at the edges as if everything but it was made of glass.
Pepper swallowed and hopped through. Wensleydale found himself almost expecting a collision, but she was just gone.
Adam went in from the other side.
“I didn’t know your uncle had a gun,” said Wensleydale, when the doorway had faded.
“Well, he did,” said Brian.
“Does,” Wensleydale corrected, automatically.
Brian gave him a furious look. “Did.”
“You don’t know that.”
Brian punched him. Not very hard, because he didn’t have the strength at the moment, but Wensleydale stumbled backwards and, when he had recovered himself, returned the sentiment with enthusiasm. There was a brief scuffle that ended when Brian began to sob.
“But it’s not real,” he said. “Not reelly real. It’s all… all…”
“That’s right,” said Wensleydale, hopelessly. Somewhere along the way the headlock he’d had Brian in had turned into an awkward, one-armed embrace. He wasn’t sure how that had happened. It was, well, messy, and uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t have been so bad but for the talking.
“It’s just Adam,” said Brian, “bein’ Adam.”
Wensleydale didn’t answer. He was thinking. There’s just us, he thought.
Piled together against the parapet, they stared up at the hole.
[1] Although unlike the shower curtains they did not have a pattern of grinning ducks on them.
It is said that a tree falling where no one can hear does not make sound. Curiously, no one has spent much time on the question of whether a tree growing where no one can hear, does.
It was a moot point, in any case. There were plenty of listeners, in the forests that now covered most of Earth’s major and minor landmasses. Creatures that should have been long-extinct, who wore their ears on various no longer fashionable body parts, listened to the vroom of saplings unfurling with the same calm acceptance with which they were handling every part of their newly regained existences[1]; and species who’d lived there all their lives, who’d thought they’d understood the world, heard, too, and promptly began running around in a panic like chickens with their heads chopped off[3].
And there were also Aziraphale and Crowley, who arguably fell into both categories.
They’d unarguably fallen into creek, twice, but now they were walking along it in a state of perfect equilibrium. That is, Aziraphale was, and Crowley was blessing quietly and continuously as he tried to dry bits of himself off on passing clumps of grass without losing his grip on Aziraphale’s ankle.
“Stop that, my dear,” said Aziraphale, “you’re rather ticklish.”
“I’m ticklish?” said Crowley. “I’ll tell you what’s ticklish, those reeds were ticklish--”
“And you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t tried to redirect my footsteps in defiance of my express wishes right at the bend,” said Aziraphale, “so do stop wriggling.”
“I’m not wriggling,” said Crowley. “Slithering, all right, undulating, maybe, but not wriggling.”
“Creeping?” suggested Aziraphale.
“I… suppose,” said Crowley, grudgingly.
“Stop creeping,” Aziraphale said pleasantly.
Crowley hissed, and tightened his hold on the angel’s warm calf.
They continued along the bank. Crowley examined his midsection for signs of shedding: mud and reeds alone didn’t seem enough to explain this kind of itch, and he often began shedding early in times of pressure. And if this wasn’t a time of pressure, he didn’t know what was.
The angel’s toes started to squelch.
“So,” said Aziraphale, “this creek will meet up with a river, you say?”
“Yes,” said Crowley.
“We’re not, oh, I don’t know, walking in the opposite direction of what we should be, by any chance?”
“No,” said Crowley.
“Because I--”
He stopped talking, because then the canopy broke, and the light poured down.
He also stopped moving, to avoid falling into water for the third time in an hour. Even as it was he had to flap a bit to regain his balance on the crumbling shore of the river.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes,” said Crowley, with no little satisfaction.
“How nice,” said Aziraphale.
His wings unfolded from his bare back. It would have been impossible to tell that they were there before they were, well, there, but Crowley, who had experience in these matters, did catch the strange complex moment in which they pushed out of the dimension of wings and into this one.
He also caught a mouthful of feathers. It was just as well that he was wrapped so closely around the warm human flesh as to be cutting off circulation. From a purely practical perspective.
Aziraphale took off ungracefully, lurching out over the surface of the waters.
Crowley, for his part, watched the ripples spread as they rose, and hung on.
[1] Spending a few thousand years trapped in amber is a great way to get a new perspective on things and eliminate material concerns[2].
[2] Like mobility and the circulation of blood.
[3] Except for the chickens who actually had had their heads chopped off: most of them had regrown in the past few hours, and as a result they were now serenely strolling around the squares where their barnyards had been before their barnyards were overgrown by nettles and flowers and trees.
Pepper stepped into snow and met Adam coming the other way.
“What bit of Russia’s this?” she asked suspiciously, jamming her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t actually cold, but it didn’t seem right, just standing there feeling nothing at all in that field of impossible white.
“Siberia,” said Adam. “That’s reelly Russian, that is.”
Pepper wrinkled her nose, but did not contest the statement. Knee-deep in a wintry wasteland, she felt, was not the time or the place for an argument with Adam Young.
“Do me like you did for Wensley an’ Brian,” she said instead, brushing her fringe out of the way. As an afterthought she rocked forwards, her toes sinking deep.
Adam looked distinctly unsettled by the sudden proximity of her forehead. He went very still.
“Hurry up,” said Pepper.
“Yeah, all right,” said Adam. He reached out.
“Ouch!”
“It’s not supposed to hurt,” said Adam, soft and confused.
“Well it did,” Pepper snapped.
“It wasn’t--”
“It did.”
He stared at her. She crossed her arms.
“So what is it I can do now?”
“Make soldiers,” said Adam, and the voice in Pepper’s mind that had sung out when she had touched the sword laughed now, and said, I already could.
She ignored it.
“Huh,” she said. “Let’s do this, then.”
Adam beamed. They did it. There was a very small space of emptiness and light, and then they did it, men shooting up from the snow around them, row by splendid row. These ones, unlike Wensleydale’s and Brian’s, came up wearing white uniforms for camouflage; and when they sprouted, curving space around the suddenness of their presence, they looked like dragon’s teeth.
go on to part two
Pairings/Characters: Most of the main cast makes an appearance, along with several minor characters and OCs. The only completely visible pairing is Anathema/Newt, but there are also hints of Shadwell/Madame Tracy, Adam/Pepper, Brian/Wensleydale, and Aziraphale/Crowley.
Rating: PG-13 for violence.
Summary: AU. Adam… succumbs to his inner Son of Satan, when the time comes. Adam being Adam, this still involves a little rewriting of the Plan.
Warnings: Major character death. And not in the sense of "Death is a major character", although he is that.
A/N: Because there's nothing more festive than a long, bleak story about the last day on Earth. I've strayed a little from the prompt, but I think I kept true to the spirit of it. In addition to Good Omens, I've drawn from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series for everything from throwaway lines to theology, but knowledge of the series isn't necessary to understand this story.
Many thanks to my beta, clodia_metelli. Without you, who knows how this would have ended? Heck, everyone might have lived happily ever after.
We can't be having with that. ♥
IN THE END
There were four children in a quarry, sitting on an old milk crate, and one of them was talking. The other three listened. There was no way they could have avoided listening to him, in that moment, though the air in the quarry felt like a knife held just against the skin, and lightning ripped apart the sky overhead.
It was coming on 8 p.m. It had not been a nice day.
“I’ve got some more friends coming,” Adam was saying. “They’ll be here soon, and then we can really get started.”
And, as it happens, you know how this story went. But the trouble with this story, as with all stories, is that they change when you look away.
So look. Look back.
Look at Pepper, who had been sitting staring at her knees, and who raised her head, now, eyes bright with the kind of anger that is really just terror: terror backed up into a corner and seeing, all too clearly, how the future will go. She had had something else on her mind, but…
“Other friends?” she said, indignantly. “We’re your friends.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. He crossed his arms. “We’ve always been your friends. Since forever an’ ever ago.”
“You’ve never needed other friends before,” said Wensleydale, pushing his spectacles up higher; they kept slipping down the bridge of his nose, because of the sheen of perspiration developing there. “Don’t see why you need ‘em now.”
“What?” said Adam.
The Them drew closer together, unconsciously. They wore identical expressions under freckles, glasses and grime.
“Seems to me,” said Pepper, “seems to me, if we’re goin’ to cut up the world, we ought to do it ourselves.”
“All for one,” murmured Wensleydale.
“An’ all that sort of thing,” finished Brian, grandly.
“I--”
Adam hesitated. The world, spinning, slowed on its axis.
This might conceivably have been a side effect of what was happening to the moon, which was being packed up early-- the archangel Gabriel liked to think of himself as a forward planner[1] and had released uncounted memos over the millennia to make sure that everyone else thought of him that way too. But probably it was the significance of the moment that was responsible. No one was paying much attention to gravity at this stage in the game.
Weightless, then, the planet waited: its future hanging, not on any golden string, but on a word.
[1] In this, he was unusual among his brethren: most angels preferred to rain fire first and explain its importance to the Plan after. A healthy supply of backward Planners is an essential part of any really impressive bureaucracy, and Heaven is no exception to the rule. It never is[2].
[2] Except possibly for “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”
It has been observed, by a more illustrious pair of narrators than the current, that people are fundamentally people. It has been said, too, that this can serve to explain most of the major events which, when lined up just so, make history.
This is not history. In this moment, here and now, with people being what they are… anything could happen. That’s the whole point.
The point of points, though, is that they are sharp. When practically applied, they almost always hurt. And as a rule the really religious prefer voodoo to acupuncture.
Somewhere, an angel is telling America, It won’t be like that at all. Not really.
He’s right, as it happens. He’s always right about that. Every single time[1].
[1] Except in the version of this universe that formed in St. John of Patmos’ head after a particularly bad batch of mushrooms, and stayed around just long enough to get written down. But that doesn’t count. That’s not very impressive, as a lifespan for a whole universe. The mushrooms stayed around for longer.
“You’re right,” said Adam, slowly.
The Them breathed in. The world whirled.
“You’re right,” Adam said, with more assurance.
He slid off the milk crate, and stood. The ground shook a little under his trainers, but the Them didn’t hold that against it; they would have done the same, in its place.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Together. We’ll do it. We’ll do it ourselves.”
There was a silence. It was expectant on Adam’s part and mystified on everyone else’s, which division had the advantage of being familiar, at least.
“Go where?” said Brian, at last.
“The air base, of course, ” Adam said. In the strangeness of the light, his face looked almost human as he smiled.
The Them did not meet one another’s eyes.
“Come on,” he told them. “We’ve got to beat the rush. You’d better go an’ get your bikes, I think. And then we’ll see.”
Index cards went everywhere, like startled birds, although they did not evacuate their bowels before fluttering away. “I’ll never be able to sort them out now,” Anathema said.
“You don’t have to,” said Newt manically. “Just pick one. Any one. It won’t matter.”
And Newt too was right. Anathema gave him an impatient look and went back to rummaging through the mess under her seat, but every word he’d just uttered was both nice and accurate. However little it would have comforted him to know it.
The Them biked in silence.
Actually, they biked in a bubble of small sounds, like the persistent rattling of Pepper’s bike (incognito[1]); and the yapping of Dog, whose nerves were all over the place[2]. But no one said anything. A casual observer would have had to beat off the things unsaid with a stick.
There were no casual observers. R.P. Tyler was still half a mile and two plastic baggies away, as yet, and the Them biked past a certain fallen signpost entirely unbothered by other people.
Adam pulled up a little way from the base. The others stopped when he did, whether or not they’d been quick enough to brake in time.
“What’re we stopping for?” said Pepper, with one foot still on a pedal.
“We’ve can’t take these with us,” said Adam, waving a hand at the bikes. “Someone might notice.”
The Them weren’t sure why Adam would care about someone noticing, but they did as they were told. They were feeling better, now. He was their leader. He was leading them, and only them, which was right. It was practically like old days, especially when his back was to them.
They reached the gate. Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger, who had been having a good if unexciting day up till then, gave them a professional once-over. “Hey--” he began.
“Sleep,” said Adam.
Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger dropped to the ground slowly. He was a tall man, and there was a lot of him to drop. When he was a uniformed heap on the tarmac, Adam hopped over his out-flung arm, and headed in, towards one of the buildings, and the Them followed.
They walked in real silence, now. Adam didn’t believe in alarms[3].
[1] That is, with sheets of cardboard attached to the unacceptably girly bits.
[2] Literally. The senses of a hellhound go a long way, though only in one direction.
[3] The smoke detectors in the Young household had been nonfunctional for about six months. The alarm clocks had been nonfunctional since almost a month before Adam was born, a thorough understanding of cause and effect never having been one of Adam’s strengths.
Sgt. Deisenburger had a very nice sleep, and dreamed of the things he liked best.
He did not wake up even when War nudged him in the side with the glossy toe of her boot. This was an event unprecedented in War’s six thousand years of experience, and she viewed it with interest and concern. She was about to take further steps[1], when Death said, DO NOT BOTHER.
“Sorry?”
HE DID THIS, said Death.
“He-- oh.”
YES.
“Is there some kind of roundabout that doesn’t get to me?” asked Famine.
“The Antichrist,” said Pollution, not unkindly, “has arrived.”
Famine frowned. “But that’s not how it goes,“ he said. “We’re supposed to come first, and set everything in motion, and then he--”
PLANS CHANGE, said Death.
“Not these plans.”
Death did not answer immediately. He walked around Sgt. Deisenburger’s outflung arm and the fine dry dust did not rise from under his heels. When he did speak, it was to say, very finally:
HE IS HERE.
[1] Onto Sgt. Deisenburger’s prone body, if at all possible.
“What’re we waiting for?” said Pepper.
“We need some things,” said Adam. “A sword, and some scales, and a crown.”
“Where’re we supposed to get those?” Brian asked.
“There,” said Adam, pointing.
“Where?” said War.
COME, said Death, AND SEE.
Around the horizon, clouds unspooled like yarn. The circle of sun directly above turned their roiling threads to gold.
The Them watched as the Four approached.
They looked, Pepper thought, quite human, for nightmares. The woman’s hair burned the eye, but the Them were used to that: they were jaded veterans of the Bottled Dye Wars[1], and had, among other things, watched Adam’s older sister Sarah go through an entire spectrum of hair colours ranging from red[2] to redder[4] when she was fifteen. Unlike Sarah, the woman wore her hair, not the other way around, but it was still… recognisable. In a way. And the man in the suit looked a bit like one of Wensleydale’s father’s coworkers, and the young man with the glazed-over eyes would have fit right in on one of the posters at school, with “COMING OUT IN THEATRES THIS JANUARY” printed large on the bottom, or, alternatively, “DRUGS: JUST SAY NO”.
As for the skeleton, the one in the biology classroom was scarier; it had eyeballs, for one thing.
“Get ready,” Adam whispered to the Them. “You know what to do.”
They nodded, grimly. They knew what to do.
[1] The casualties were mainly shower caps, although the kitchen sink would bear battle scars to the end of its days.
[2] Alias ‘Rich Pale Mahogany With A Hint Of Blackberry’ [3].
[3] The marketers believed in taking inspiration where they found it, even if that was in a wine bottle, or, more frequently, on the label on the wine bottle’s slightly sticky side, during the morning after they’d conspicuously missed that deadline.
[4] Alias ‘Dark Glossy Burgundy #1971, And What A Good Year That Was, Too’.
R.P. Tyler went by the Youngs’ house every day for his evening constitutional; and in at least one way this day was no different from any other.
“Evening, Young,” he called out to Mr. Young, who was smoking on the deck.
Mr. Young gave him a calm look that revealed just enough irritation at this form of address to convey his real feelings, in much the same way the flash of a piranha’s fin in dark water can say more than the entire fish leaping out to bite your face, not least because, while biting your face, its mouth is too full to talk.
“Evening,” he said, blowing a ring.
R.P. Tyler, who had had a rather nice walk, and who had gotten to give three separate sets of directions-- one to some motorcyclists, one to a young man whose car had been on fire, and one to a ventriloquist-- decided to let this pass. He was in a good mood. He’d already decided that the car couldn’t have been on fire, not really, and that it was all down the unhealthy excesses of youth.
He tromped onward. Shutzi snuffled after.
Mr. Young sent another ring rising through the first one, and leaned back, in his chair.
In both of the skull’s sockets, something bright flared.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, said Death.
“You don’t have to,” said Adam, his smile sweet.
They stared at each other: the boy and Death. The dark under the cowl reflected in Adam’s pupils, and the blue of his eyes was there in Death’s, burning at the bottom of the dark.
“Now,” Adam said.
Neither he nor Death looked up when War screamed, though for once her voice had no metallic overtones. It was just a scream.
“Take it, Pepper,” Adam said.
Neither looked up when Famine said, “No--”
“Yes,” Adam said.
And neither looked up when Pollution ran, his shoes scraping earth.
“Go on,” Adam said.
Brian had Adam’s voice in his ears. He ran faster.
When, after a time, Pollution began to weep, Death’s head turned as though dragged. The Three were huddled behind him now, in utter disarray: hands empty and heads bare, twitching with wordless shock.
He swept around again in time to see the Them arrange themselves at Adam’s back in a defensive square. They looked strangely impressive. The stolen silver overwhelmed the fact of their size, the cartoon designs on their T-shirts, their uncertainty: its glow was in every square inch of their skin.
Adam said, “You’ve got to do what I say, now.”
I AM AZRAEL, said Death. I AM NOT LIKE THEM. YOU CANNOT OUTSOURCE MY JOB.
He straightened, slowly. Wings opened out of his robe in a flare of black, like the first burst of colour as a droplet of ink hits water.
And far above, in the fullness of the sky, invisible pinions tightened sympathetically as his unrolled. The ranks of Heaven and Hell felt the wind begin to blow, harder than before.
“I know you aren’t,” said Adam. “That’s why you’ve got to do what I say.”
A pause. Death grinned.
I HAVE WAITED FOR THIS A LONG TIME, ADAM YOUNG, he said. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.
“I know,” Adam repeated. “You think I don’t know?”
Death said nothing.
There was a commotion coming from the gates. Adam, more interested in the commotion that wasn’t coming from the sky, tilted his head back. It no longer took much to make out the details of the assembled armies. They had no real volume, but they occupied the space in spite of it, their eagerness distorting the light.
“This is what’s goin’ to happen,” he told the Them. “Brian, when I say go, you throw that crown up, just as hard as you can. Wensley--” He thought for a bit. “Wensley, you c’n swing the scales, so they spin.”
He thought for a bit more. “And Pepper?”
“Huh?” said Pepper, who had been watching the fuss that was taking place at the gate, where a middle-aged woman and a shapeless little figure wrapped in plaid and a man in sunglasses were getting out of a van.
“You stick that in the ground,” said Adam. “You stick it good.”
“Oh,” she said, distantly. “Yes.”
LEAVE NOW, said Death, to the Three.
“This isn’t what we were promised,” hissed War.
NO, Death agreed.
Light glinted off bone in a suspiciously humourous fashion. War wavered for a moment, then spat blood and stalked off.
“This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this,” said Famine, coldly, wiping his hands on his tailored suit, which showed the stains, for once, like dark mouths opening in the weave of the fabric.
I’M SURE, said Death. Famine limped away.
Pollution, though, didn’t look well. Certainly not well enough for locomotion.
“You…” he moaned.
I, said Death, as gently as was possible in a voice like the falling of stone on stone.
“Now,” Adam said.
In the end, the Them did what they were told.
There should have been sound effects, there at the last. But there was only the music of silver. Silver and air and silver and silver and silver and old stone; and Adam, hands agleam.
If you took the world away and just left the electricity-- well, you’d never get anything really interesting done.
So Adam, considerately, took away the electricity. And he took away the poisons, and he took away the cities, and he took away the walls; and in their place he put things right.
It helped, of course, that by then matters was already in motion. Take the Kappamaki, for instance, along with all the whaling ships like it, floating bemused on a winedark sea. Just as the sword’s tip broke the crust of the hard-packed dirt, the kraken broke the surface of the water.
Matters moved. There was, very shortly afterward, no trace of boat left, except in the contented gleam of the kraken’s open mouth.
In its wake Adam put live whales, thinking of Anathema. He remembered who his friends were, after all.
Anathema was crouching by the hole in the fence, her arms shielding her head. Newt held onto her. He pressed his nose against her shoulder, his glasses skewing in the process, until all he could see was blurred brilliance coming in around the edge of her neck. She was crying, he realised.
The soldier who was supposed to be guarding the hole sat down next to them. “Get a room,” he suggested, not unkindly, and added, “We could all do with a room, a time like this.”
“It’s over,” Anathema kept saying. She had index cards clamped down between her fingers and her plaster-dusted hair like a veil. Married to her work, Newt thought, and had a horrible urge to laugh.
The wind was rising.
“It’s all over.”
But it wasn’t, yet, Newt almost replied. That was the worst thing. They’d come too late, but that didn’t mean it was over. That just meant they were getting front row seats.
He didn’t say it. Her eyes were terribly green.
And green…
…spread over the Earth, seeping into places it had not touched for millennia. From space, the planet looked now like a fire opal at some unseen dancer’s throat, colour slithering in clear dark depths as it wheeled across the night.
The deserts flowered; and in the rainforests, flowers began to seek out dessert. Preferably raw.
The green spread. Under it, people died, vanished, climbed: not always in that order.
Adam listened, and when he was satisfied with the lush quality of quiet, he moved on. There was a lot of Earth, he thought. It was a good thing he was there, finally, to take care of it.
Now consider the Them, who had, to a one, made their choice.
Brian had one hand stretched toward the sky, his short, compact body lifting as if pulled up by a single string, hooked in his palm. The crown, thrown, dangled overhead at the summit of its arc. Wensleydale, to his left, was watching in fascination as the fine chains of the scales wrapped around, and around, and around.
Pepper was on one knee. Her eyes were closed. Her knuckles were white.
There were other people, there: the unlikely party from the van and, forming rapidly in the background, two men of fire. But the Them composed the foreground. And Adam, of course, was the focal point.
He glanced over his shoulder at the gathering adults, who wanted to interrupt. Who thought that they could change what was happening by talking. To him. About his father. He looked down, and then up. His face took on an expression of mild disgust.
There was a moment of conflict. But Adam was on his own ground. It was his ground. He’d made it so.
His hand moved in a blurred half circle.
There was light.
ELEVEN MINUTES AGO
Crowley closed his eyes when the light started, but he didn’t get a chance to open them again because the next thing he knew he was in Hell, where eyelids are frowned upon. Often from great heights. At least, he thought it was Hell. There was a shadow taking up most of his view.
Crowley squinted at it. The shadow, helpfully, resolved itself into a Duke of Hell.
Well. That settled that, and also quite a few other questions his brain had been lining up, like, ‘am I going to get out of this in one piece?’ and ‘will there be grapes?’
“Hello, Crawly,” said Hastur.
“Hi,” said Crowley. He felt very calm. It was probably some kind of flash of prophetic insight he was having. Probably sheerest oblivion was quite a calm state to be in, he reasoned, and probably he’d get there eventually, after a few longish eternities of pain.
“You’re in trouble, Crawly,” said Hastur. He did not smile.
“Really?” said Crowley brightly.
“This way,” the duke growled, and took him by the memory of a shoulder.
With less ado than he might have liked, Crowley found himself being marched deeper into the Pit.
“Aziraphale,” said the Metatron, “you have strayed.”
“Really,” said Aziraphale. He made a game attempt to sit up, but possessing people always left his ectoplasm confused and he ended up just wobbling into a more vertical pile of angelic presence on the Metatron’s office’s otherwise immaculate carpet.
“Yes,” said the Metatron, little tongues of flame snapping off its face.
Aziraphale nodded.
“What exactly… just happened?” he asked.
The Metatron sniffed.
“We are looking into it,” it said. “But as for you…”
Its mouth curved upward. The smile was not unpleasant: it was simply the smile of a bad job well brushed under the rug.
“See for yourself,” it said.
Crowley stared at the light. It cut through the dark ceiling of Dis and reached down to the ground in a flawless white column.
“What,” he said.
“Yeah,” agreed Hastur, grudgingly. “’s’not natural.”
“I-- no,” said Crowley. “Um. Is that--”
Hastur did smile, then.
“You lucky bastard,” he said, “you’re getting your old job back.”
“Oh, no,” said Crowley.
“Oh, yes,” said Hastur.
“Oh, no,” said Crowley.
“Oh, y-- for crying out loud, have a little self respect, why don’t you.”
He punctuated this kind advice with a push.
“Oh, noooooooooo,” said Crowley, stumbling, and--
Schloop, went the light.
“Sorry?” said Aziraphale. “You’re what?”
“Giving you your job back,” said the Metatron, calmly.
“But you said--”
“Second chances are policy,” said the Metatron.
It pressed a button. A wall slid back, and the light poured in. Aziraphale began to tremble as only a morphically confused mass of spiritual essence can.
“We look forward to your report,” said the Metatron, in a way that did not invite further questions.
Aziraphale, for want of any more palatable options and, indeed, any options at all, went to the light. The Metatron’s blank gaze followed him all the way across the floor.
Schloop.
The Metatron cocked its head to one side.
“Curious,” it said.
Then it went back to the paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork on its desk, and there would be more. Very shortly.
SUNDAY
(The rest of their lives.)
It was a day.
It would have been impossible to say whether it was a nice one or not, because the forest canopy was a solid mass overhead, a second firmament: but it was certainly a day of some kind, because Aziraphale could hear birds singing, somewhere.
He also heard a voice say, from the general vicinity of his foot, "Well, that one went down like a lead balloon."
"Sorry?" he said, taking a wary step backward.
A sleek triangular head rose out of the ferny mulch. "I said--" the snake began.
"That's all right, actually," said Aziraphale, holding up a hand. He paused, and added, "Hello, Crowley," and rubbed his eyes.
Crowley snorted in a way that was neither polite nor convincingly serpentine.
“Huh,” he said.
Aziraphale took another step back, and sat down on what he assumed was a log. In a way he was correct-- it hadn’t been up till then, but when an angel assumes something is a log, it’s the loglike object that’s in for a surprise.
“Well,” he said. “Erm. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea… is the War…?”
“The War’s off,” said Crowley. “Or else they’re holding it on the moon, or something. There’s no one here.” He slid over, as he spoke, to coil by Aziraphale’s bare feet.
Aziraphale sniffed. The air in the rainforest was thick with moisture; and it was true that the smell of things growing and rotting and living, unseen and untended, was not a smell that had anything to do with waiting armies.
“What about the humans?” he asked.
Crowley said, bitterly, “What about them?”
“Where did they all go?”
Crowley tried to shrug, and ended up in a sprawl of persistently shoulderless muscle. “Where do humans ever go?”
Neither of them spoke again for a while after that.
Anathema hadn’t gone anywhere. She hadn’t moved once, all through the night. Newt woke-- came to, really-- with her still in his arms.
“Hey,” he said, quietly. And then, louder, “Um. Anathema?”
“Looks to me like nobody’s home,” drawled the ex-guard. The hole and the fence both having vanished long since, he’d declared himself off-duty, doffed his helmet and lain down in the newly luxuriant bushes, his arms behind his head. He looked quite comfortable, thought Newt enviously. Newt, who could be uncomfortable in a spa and indeed had on multiple occasions broken out in a rash on contact with warm, soothing, herbally infused steam[1], rather thought he would rupture something if he stayed on the ground another minute.
“Rise and shine,” he suggested to Anathema, hopefully. She didn’t stir.
“She was crazy,” said the ex-guard. “Didn’t you hear her? Screaming like a fuckin’ banshee.”
“Shut up,” said Newt.
The ex-guard started to say something, but Newt didn’t hear what, because then Anathema stood up, dragging Newt with her as she unfolded.
He untangled himself hastily. She shook her head, as if to clear it, and looked around.
“Where are we?”
“The airbase,” said Newt.
Anathema said, “This isn’t the airbase.”
“Well, it was,” said Newt, a little irritated. “The trees are new.”
Anathema walked past him to the edge of the clearing, and laid a hand on one of the new trees, which had gleaming, leathery bark and a lacy beard of strange crisp lichens.
“Uh,” said Newt, “touching that is probably--”
“Agnes didn’t write this,” said Anathema.
“Yes, well--”
“Who?” said the ex-guard.
“We’re still here,” she said.
“Yes, I know--”
“Who’s this Agnes?” demanded the ex-guard, propping himself up on his elbow. “Are you lot journalists?”
“No, but we know a lot about the newspaper business,” Newt said, under his breath.
“She was my great-great-great-to-the-umpteenth-grandmother,” said Anathema, briskly. “She foretold all this, except for the parts she didn’t.”
The ex-guard considered this. Newt closed his eyes.
“I’ve got an aunt who’s like that,” said the ex-guard, after a pause. “’specially after two gins.”
“Yes,” said Anathema, “probably.”
She gave him a brilliant smile, and then, when he began to smile uncertainly back, hit him over the head with a stick, quite hard. And it occurred to Newt, watching, that she must have been holding the stick the whole time. The whole night through.
He wondered what she'd intended to use it for before.
The ex-guard yelped and toppled sideways wearing a surprised expression. Newt waited for his eyes to roll up in his head, like in the movies, but all that happened was a steady stream of profanity.
“…the hell did you do that for?” he moaned, clutching his skull.
“This,” said Anathema smartly, pulling the gun out of the man’s other, unresisting hand. “Let’s go,” she told Newt.
“Absolutely,” said Newt, staring at the guard, who was still conscious, and had begun to cry softly, and looked like he would shortly regain the hand-eye coordination necessary to punch someone. “no problem, whatever you want--”
Anathema took his hand.
“…oh,” said Newt.
“Let’s go now,” Anathema said. She hefted the gun. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
“For what, exactly?” Newt asked. “I could probably use it to prop up a stool, or, or beautify a mantelpiece--”
Her mouth tasted like mouths generally do before their owners have brushed their teeth. Newt leaned into the kiss, and felt the dampness on her face transfer to his, and wondered what it meant to be so unbearably happy on this morning, of all the mornings he had ever known.
There was vivid moss clinging to her hair, he noticed. And in her open eyes he could just about make out the alien twists of the forest, behind them.
He breathed in.
[1] Newt was not allergic to any one plant species and his reaction to the spa’s atmospheric elements had mystified the doctors he’d seen about it. Newt suspected that what he was really allergic to was aromatherapy, but he’d never told anyone that, for fear of being thought odd.
Elsewhere in what had been the airbase, the Them stirred, as statues do in charmingly illustrated yet subtly horrifying children’s stories after the people have all gone from the public squares.
“Pepper? Wensleydale? Brian?”
They blinked at him owlishly.
“I want to show you all something,” said Adam. “One at a time.”
He smiled, almost shyly. He looked very young.
“Who wants to go first?”
“Me,” blurted Brian.
The other two stared at him. “I want to,” he said, defiantly.
And then, without any special effects, he rose into the air.
When he realised what was happening he began to flail like a boy possessed, which in the most technical sense of term, he was; but by then he was barely more than a grubby dot in the blue heavens. Adam went at a more leisurely pace, arms stretched out in front of him like a superhero’s. There was something cartoonish about his upraised face, too; the brightness of morning simplified his features, and drew straight lines of shade over his skin, at least while he was still close enough to appear to have skin at all.
Pepper’s sword made a scraping sound when she wrenched it out of the Earth.
“D’you think he’ll be all right?” she said.
“Who?” asked Wensleydale, tiredly.
Pepper bit her lip.
“You all right?” Adam said.
“I’m feelin’ just fine,” said Brian, firmly. His face was clean, for once, washed pale by cold sweat over the course of the night and, subsequently, the flight. His usual light furring of dirt had been dragged down by the slide of water, and was drying on the underside of his jaw.
Adam looked doubtfully at him. “Well,” he said, nodding to what lay far too far below, “that’s Africa.”
It was.
“Gosh,” said Brian, and tried very hard not to throw up.
Adam clapped him on the back in a way that Adam had never done before.
“It’ll be great,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Brian nodded slightly. He’d taken to moving his head by very small degrees to minimize sloshing, in the past hour.
He was going, he thought, to be sick.
According to Pepper, Wensleydale was next. Wensleydale didn’t quite see how she’d reached that conclusion when she told him so, but when she pushed him forward the instant Adam and Brian returned, then he got it.
He also got America. He didn’t like America much, either.
He especially didn’t like America from miles and miles up: but that was where he was. He was miles above America. He was also floating comfortably in a nimbus of blue, and that would have been great, only he had a suspicion that the instant Adam got distracted he’d be falling from miles above America in a nimbus of red. On the whole, Wensleydale had had better Sundays, down to and including the ones with all his aunts in.
“That bit’s yours,” said Adam, softly, his fingertip describing the curl of the continent laid out below.
It's just a lot of dirt, Wensleydale thought, with some clarity. The people are... are hiding... and what's mine is dirt and trees and big, hungry animals and probably no flavours of ice cream at all.
Adam was looking at him.
“Thank you,” said Wensleydale, politely.
“'Welcome,” said Adam, and starlight, unsoftened by much intermediary air, flashed off his teeth as he grinned.
And:
“It’s bigger than I expected it to be,” said Pepper, a shade critically.
“It’s the biggest continent,” said Adam. “By-- by lots.”
“Huh,” said Pepper.
“There’s room here for anything you want,” said Adam.
Pepper twisted onto her back, until she was looking up at the blackness of space.
“Yeah,” she said. “I expect.”
“This is England, isn’t it,” said Crowley.
“Probably,” said Aziraphale, and, “Was.”
“We could…”
“Yes?”
Crowley stared at nothing.
Actually, he stared at a chameleon that had emerged from a profusion of glistening leaves. It had spines, and it was as tastelessly green as the foliage, and the skin of its flanks looked almost glassy. He hadn’t seen one like it since the day it’d been named.
“We could go back to Lower Tadfield,” he said.
“Walk there, d’you mean?” said Aziraphale.
Crowley hissed. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually,” said the angel, coldly. “What are we supposed to do once we’re there? Admire the gardens?”
“I don’t think there are any gardens left,” said Crowley. The chameleon had vanished, quick as the curl of light on the leaves it left shuddering in its wake.
Aziraphale made an exasperated sound. “We haven’t--”
“--anything better to do,” Crowley finished, smoothly. “Listen, I’m not saying… let’s just go look, all right? We can go and see. Find a river, or something, an open space where you can fly up, and… look.”
“Charming,” said the angel. But he got off the log[1].
Crowley took the opportunity to attach himself to his leg.
“I say--” said the angel.
“It’s practical! It’s practical!” said Crowley.
“Practical,” said Aziraphale, “would be you shedding the silly snakesuit and--”
“I can’t.”
Aziraphale raised an eyebrow.
“Really,” said Crowley. “You think I’d still be on my belly if I had any better options?”
“You’re not on your belly,” said Aziraphale, “just now. More’s the pity.”
His eyes glinted dangerously. This did not escape Crowley, who decided he was going to magnanimously overlook the angel’s rudeness, for the time being.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said. “Otherwise one or the other of us won’t be able to keep up, and I’m not entirely sure which, don’t look at me like that, snakes are lithe, and we want to stick together, don’t we?”
Aziraphale stared at his ensnared ankle.
“I think so,” he said, “but at the moment I’m hard-pressed to recall why.”
Crowley smiled like a human. This was quite a feat.
“The Arrangement’s not over,” he said.
“It was never meant to last past Armageddon,” Aziraphale said.
“No,” said Crowley. “It was never meant to last past the end of the world. The world’s not gone, exactly, is it.”
Aziraphale harrumphed. But he didn’t argue, Crowley noticed, and after another moment he began to pick his way toward the sound of running water, not far off.
[1] Which promptly resumed its interrupted career as an alligator[2]. It waited until the two-legged food and, more importantly, the two-legged food’s bottom had wandered off into the woods before moving, however. It had too many splinters for its liking as it was.
[2] Though ever after, it would feel the occasional urge to float around in the mud and do nothing. Since it was an alligator, this did not result in any noticeable change in its behavioral patterns.
The Them regrouped in the quarry, which looked exactly like it had yesterday.
“Let’s have a war,” said Adam.
There was a silence.
“Who with?” Brian asked, eventually.
Adam gave this due consideration for all of a sixth of a second.
“It’ll be us,” he said firmly. “Me and Pepper against you and Wensley.”
“Oh,” said Wensleydale. Pepper elbowed him in the ribs and jerked her head urgently at Brian, so he added, with false heartiness, “Sounds brilliant.”
“’Course it does,” said Adam. “Land or sea?”
“What?” said Wensleydale, who’d been distracted by all the liquids that seemed to be oozing from unexpected orifices in Brian’s face. They were all subject to regular colds, except Adam[1], but this was worrying even by the Them’s standards.
“Land,” said Adam patiently, “or sea.”
“Uh,” said Wensleydale.
“Land,” said Pepper.
They looked at her.
“We c’n have it on my territory, because Asia’s biggest,” she went on. Her hands, they saw, were folded neatly in her lap.
“That’s set, then,” said Adam.
The sun glowed on Pepper’s disintegrating braids. The quarry seemed very warm and small, after having touched the chilly edge of the sky, and the light was soft and buttery, except in the tangles of Pepper’s hair, where it developed the faintly overconfident quality of the shine you get on polished metal.
They kept looking at her. Adam, blinking, raised a hand toward her tense face.
[1] Who’d got colds on beautiful spring days where it’d be practic’ly inhuman, anyway, to keep a growin’ boy shut up in a classroom, back when there were classrooms, and who thought of thermometers as natural accomplices in crime.
The world changed.
Again.
“Welcome to China,” Adam said, rather impressively, when the Them had uncurled from trembling fetal positions. “You can be here, and we’ll be in Russia, and the troops can meet in the middle, see?”
“Brilliant,” repeated Wensleydale, nervously. Beside him, Brian threw up.
The vomit steamed away the instant it hit stone. They were standing on a part of the Great Wall that had never been open to tourists, and vomit would have ruined the view, but it still frightened Wensleydale to see the bile turn to vapour, just like that.
Just like that, Adam touched two fingers to the center of his forehead. It hurt.
“Now,” he said, “just think of what kinds of soldiers you’d like, that’s all, and where you want them to go. They’ll do it.”
He turned to Brian, and Brian backed away, gasping. Adam didn’t seem to notice; he was examining the patch of ancient stone where the vomit had, very briefly, been.
“You have to pull yourself together,” Pepper whispered to Brian. She took his elbow and shook him, which struck Wensleydale as astonishingly counterintuitive, even by Pepper’s standards; but it had the desired effect. Brian closed his mouth, at least, and wiped away the dribble on his chin.
Adam scuffed his trainer on the stone to no visible effect. Then he reached out and tapped Brian’s face, a little lower than he’d done it on Wensleydale because, among other things, Brian was nodding a bit.
“Now try,” said Adam. “Both of you.”
“’Scuse me,” said Pepper, with magnificent iciness, “but it seems to me you’ve forgotten someone.”
Adam shook his head. “We can’t make ours until we’re up north. Otherwise how’ll we lay ambushes and have amazin’ tactical manoeuvres?”
“Well… all right,” said Pepper, reluctantly. “But it dun’t seem fair, that they get to start first.”
“Everyone gets a turn,” said Adam.
The Them nodded. That was how it worked. Everyone always got a turn.
Only everyone hadn’t just been… them, up till now.
“Go on,” said Adam.
Wensleydale went to the parapet and leaned over. From there the treetops on the slope were a dense carpet of green.
Feeling rather silly, he shut his eyes and pictured the same slope, but with soldiers in the trees, their helmets rising out of the branches like government-issued fruit.
He opened his eyes.
And gaped, a little.
“This is going to be brilliant,” Adam said, at his back.
Out of the trees rose enormous… humanoid figures. They were slightly transparent, like the shower curtains at home[1], and they had solemn faces that might have come right out of a plastic mould, and they were sitting in the trees, like he’d imagined, only they were using the trees’ bushy crowns like bean bags, and Wensleydale didn’t even think that was possible, structurally speaking, but there they were.
“Coo,” said Brian.
“Wowie,” said Pepper.
Wensleydale wondered whether he was catching whatever Brian had.
One of the huge, helmeted heads turned toward him. The eyes were flat and as camouflaged as the rest of it, and Wensleydale flinched. He could see the raised seam on the side of the face, exactly where it would have been on a toy. They weren’t toys, though.
“You can shrink ‘em,” said Adam, carelessly. “If you like.”
Brian screwed up his nose in thought. The soldiers’ bodies disappeared downward, sinking into the sea of glittering leaves.
The colour of them seemed to concentrate as they contracted, so that by the time it was just their shoulders and heads poking out, they looked almost solid. It wasn’t an improvement.
“What about guns?” Brian asked.
“They’ve got guns,” Pepper said, and it was true; they did have guns, sticking out of their backs. At least, there were tubes with triggers.
“Do they work, though, is the thing,” Brian said. “My uncle has a gun, an’ he said it was awfully complicated, an’ that using one well was like playing an instrument, an’ I was never very good at piano…”
“I was,” Wensleydale pointed out.
“Yeah, but you’ve got, well, glasses,” said Brian, a shade apologetically.
“I saw a film where the sharpshooter wore glasses, an’ he did just fine,” said Pepper. “Glasses probably help, I bet. I bet they make you even--”
“You won’t be using it,” Adam said, in a voice like scissors. He waved at the soldiers, and said, “They will.”
Apparently to punctuate his sentence, one stood on its branch and took aim at a spot a few inches from where Wensleydale’s fingers were curled over the rough outer edge of the parapet.
Wensleydale leapt back just in time to avoid being sprayed with ancient bits of stone.
“That’s a historic monument, that is,” he said accusingly, before he could stop himself.
“There’s not going to be any history anymore,” said Adam. “There’s just us."
He glanced at the hole. "Anyway, I can fix it. I can make it better, if you want.”
Wensleydale opened his mouth, and closed it again.
“Nah,” said Brian, after a quiet minute. “It’s a good hole.”
Adam shrugged. He said, “It’s all the same to me.”
“Hey, Adam, shouldn’t we be in Russia? An’ planning our attack?” said Pepper, meaningfully.
“Sure,” said Adam, turning to her. He drew a doorway in the air between them with one finger, his arm describing impossibly straight lines. The doorway, finished, glistened faintly at the edges as if everything but it was made of glass.
Pepper swallowed and hopped through. Wensleydale found himself almost expecting a collision, but she was just gone.
Adam went in from the other side.
“I didn’t know your uncle had a gun,” said Wensleydale, when the doorway had faded.
“Well, he did,” said Brian.
“Does,” Wensleydale corrected, automatically.
Brian gave him a furious look. “Did.”
“You don’t know that.”
Brian punched him. Not very hard, because he didn’t have the strength at the moment, but Wensleydale stumbled backwards and, when he had recovered himself, returned the sentiment with enthusiasm. There was a brief scuffle that ended when Brian began to sob.
“But it’s not real,” he said. “Not reelly real. It’s all… all…”
“That’s right,” said Wensleydale, hopelessly. Somewhere along the way the headlock he’d had Brian in had turned into an awkward, one-armed embrace. He wasn’t sure how that had happened. It was, well, messy, and uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t have been so bad but for the talking.
“It’s just Adam,” said Brian, “bein’ Adam.”
Wensleydale didn’t answer. He was thinking. There’s just us, he thought.
Piled together against the parapet, they stared up at the hole.
[1] Although unlike the shower curtains they did not have a pattern of grinning ducks on them.
It is said that a tree falling where no one can hear does not make sound. Curiously, no one has spent much time on the question of whether a tree growing where no one can hear, does.
It was a moot point, in any case. There were plenty of listeners, in the forests that now covered most of Earth’s major and minor landmasses. Creatures that should have been long-extinct, who wore their ears on various no longer fashionable body parts, listened to the vroom of saplings unfurling with the same calm acceptance with which they were handling every part of their newly regained existences[1]; and species who’d lived there all their lives, who’d thought they’d understood the world, heard, too, and promptly began running around in a panic like chickens with their heads chopped off[3].
And there were also Aziraphale and Crowley, who arguably fell into both categories.
They’d unarguably fallen into creek, twice, but now they were walking along it in a state of perfect equilibrium. That is, Aziraphale was, and Crowley was blessing quietly and continuously as he tried to dry bits of himself off on passing clumps of grass without losing his grip on Aziraphale’s ankle.
“Stop that, my dear,” said Aziraphale, “you’re rather ticklish.”
“I’m ticklish?” said Crowley. “I’ll tell you what’s ticklish, those reeds were ticklish--”
“And you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t tried to redirect my footsteps in defiance of my express wishes right at the bend,” said Aziraphale, “so do stop wriggling.”
“I’m not wriggling,” said Crowley. “Slithering, all right, undulating, maybe, but not wriggling.”
“Creeping?” suggested Aziraphale.
“I… suppose,” said Crowley, grudgingly.
“Stop creeping,” Aziraphale said pleasantly.
Crowley hissed, and tightened his hold on the angel’s warm calf.
They continued along the bank. Crowley examined his midsection for signs of shedding: mud and reeds alone didn’t seem enough to explain this kind of itch, and he often began shedding early in times of pressure. And if this wasn’t a time of pressure, he didn’t know what was.
The angel’s toes started to squelch.
“So,” said Aziraphale, “this creek will meet up with a river, you say?”
“Yes,” said Crowley.
“We’re not, oh, I don’t know, walking in the opposite direction of what we should be, by any chance?”
“No,” said Crowley.
“Because I--”
He stopped talking, because then the canopy broke, and the light poured down.
He also stopped moving, to avoid falling into water for the third time in an hour. Even as it was he had to flap a bit to regain his balance on the crumbling shore of the river.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes,” said Crowley, with no little satisfaction.
“How nice,” said Aziraphale.
His wings unfolded from his bare back. It would have been impossible to tell that they were there before they were, well, there, but Crowley, who had experience in these matters, did catch the strange complex moment in which they pushed out of the dimension of wings and into this one.
He also caught a mouthful of feathers. It was just as well that he was wrapped so closely around the warm human flesh as to be cutting off circulation. From a purely practical perspective.
Aziraphale took off ungracefully, lurching out over the surface of the waters.
Crowley, for his part, watched the ripples spread as they rose, and hung on.
[1] Spending a few thousand years trapped in amber is a great way to get a new perspective on things and eliminate material concerns[2].
[2] Like mobility and the circulation of blood.
[3] Except for the chickens who actually had had their heads chopped off: most of them had regrown in the past few hours, and as a result they were now serenely strolling around the squares where their barnyards had been before their barnyards were overgrown by nettles and flowers and trees.
Pepper stepped into snow and met Adam coming the other way.
“What bit of Russia’s this?” she asked suspiciously, jamming her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t actually cold, but it didn’t seem right, just standing there feeling nothing at all in that field of impossible white.
“Siberia,” said Adam. “That’s reelly Russian, that is.”
Pepper wrinkled her nose, but did not contest the statement. Knee-deep in a wintry wasteland, she felt, was not the time or the place for an argument with Adam Young.
“Do me like you did for Wensley an’ Brian,” she said instead, brushing her fringe out of the way. As an afterthought she rocked forwards, her toes sinking deep.
Adam looked distinctly unsettled by the sudden proximity of her forehead. He went very still.
“Hurry up,” said Pepper.
“Yeah, all right,” said Adam. He reached out.
“Ouch!”
“It’s not supposed to hurt,” said Adam, soft and confused.
“Well it did,” Pepper snapped.
“It wasn’t--”
“It did.”
He stared at her. She crossed her arms.
“So what is it I can do now?”
“Make soldiers,” said Adam, and the voice in Pepper’s mind that had sung out when she had touched the sword laughed now, and said, I already could.
She ignored it.
“Huh,” she said. “Let’s do this, then.”
Adam beamed. They did it. There was a very small space of emptiness and light, and then they did it, men shooting up from the snow around them, row by splendid row. These ones, unlike Wensleydale’s and Brian’s, came up wearing white uniforms for camouflage; and when they sprouted, curving space around the suddenness of their presence, they looked like dragon’s teeth.
go on to part two