Page 23 of Angel Down

and Bagger’s lenses stop fogging because he’s no longer breathing, it’s one thing to chuck corpses into a hole, spray quicklime, shovel in soil, and cultivate a cornfield, another thing to revisit that field and find it peopled by sentient stalks, the angel casts away the world’s funereal obfuscations, the tastefully wrapped shrouds, the carefully covered wagons, the sealed grave pits that minimize the enormity of lives lost,

and the risen corpses undulate in the wind, uniforms loose over body parts blown away, emptied sheaths of skin fluttering like the planted flags of pointless patriotism, swaths of purple muscle speckled with snow, exposed bones swaying in ways similar to how the men moved when they were industrious little death machines, it’s almost funny how much it meant to them to kill, the ones whose faces have been ripped off grin at Bagger in silent laughter, chattering teeth,

and at the center of this revenant army stands Ben Veck, who knows what’s going on by the clucks of broken bones and the slaps of bloody skin, he staggers around until a boot snags and he stumbles, left shoulder planting into one of the dangling bodies, a fellow American, it’s like swatting an outfit draped from a hanger, the corpse jiggles and its olive drabs billow, and an arm that was nearly severed finally disconnects, yet still floats midair,

and Veck must feel what Bagger feels, the scope of violence now as naked as him, the angel insisting that Veck’s wish has already been granted, the end he pleads for is already here, the Great War a wheel set in motion that’s far too heavy to halt,

and Veck appears to comprehend this so rapidly that he becomes the shrieker, caught on uncuttable barbed wire, “I’M SORRY! NAOMI, I’M SO SORRY!” he shrieks while bumbling into this dangling doughboy, that suspended Jerry, until he falls, and Bagger doesn’t know if Veck’s own naked knee does it on purpose or not, but Bagger hears the sucking ping of impact, sharp as musket shot, followed by a whoosh, it’s the P3’s propellant tank, punctured of its pressurized gas,

and Veck explodes,

and the shock wave shreds his meat off his bones,

and in the red spritz, his tendoned finger bones wrench the valve,

and flame spews into the spouting gas,

and silver fire gouts, a throaty roar, a funeral pyre fifty feet high,

and wind punches Bagger in the chest, and he blacks out,

and he thinks he sees the dead curl back down, a litter of sleepy pups,

XXXI

and in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night, and the evening and morning were the first day,

and Bagger’s lost somewhere in that cycle, same as he’s lost somewhere on the Western Front, same as he got lost in Genesis 5 each time he attempted to read the Bible to impress his father, that pileup of humanity that now reads like a necrology of fallen soldiers, General Adam, Lieutenant General Seth, Colonel Enos, Major Cainan, Captain Mahalaleel, Corporal Jared, and Privates Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah,

and it’s an order of battle that eventually begets Private Cyril Bagger, how about that, after all the bravado mustered to cover his loneliness, he’s most definitely not alone, he’s a bud at one tip of history’s most expansive root, and if he could turn around, he might be able to follow the root back to its original tree, lording over its original garden,

and when he opens his eyes he has to blink away snow that has gathered atop the feather bed of his lashes, a motion that melts some of it, which create puddles he allows to absorb into his eyes, feels nice and cool in the toxic afterburn, and it’s only as his sight unblurs that he becomes aware of the monster in front of him,

and Bagger spends a few petrified seconds telling himself this isn’t the first time he’s mistakenly spotted a monster, there was the time a man’s full suit of skin swung from a tree like a winged aberration, the time he saw three heads next to one another in the mud and thought it was Satan’s centipede, you see a lot of shit out here requiring a beat of calm decryption,

and so it’s a bad sign when the monster doesn’t resolve into something explainable, good lord, the thing’s hideous, two jet-black eyeballs the size of tea plates protruding from malformed lumps of wrinkled brown flesh, the face narrowing into an aardvark trunk, the end of which is layered in rings of tiny needle teeth,

and when Bagger tries to squirm away he realizes he’s flat on his back on the cold Argonne floor, and worse, still cuffed to the Fahrpanzer, which means this thing is floating above him, fucking floating, its body aligned to Bagger’s own right down to the olive drabs, though the drabs aren’t quite standard-issue four-pocketed wool, these drabs look more like fur and grow right out of the skin,

and when Bagger turns his head to the right to hide from the sharklike stare, the monster does the same turn, and when Bagger holds up a hand to beg for mercy, the monster raises its hand, too, which looks human enough until Bagger notices the absence of fingernails, the extra joint in the thumb, the total lack of fingerprints,

and Bagger whines, it feels like this thing is studying him, like the codger who concluded Bagger’s Army physical by cupping his balls and telling him to cough, and as if requiring closer review, the monster floats closer, and Bagger whimpers, what if he touches this leathery mutant and loses his mind,

and when, in fact, the long snout nudges Bagger, he gasps the lungful of air he’ll need to scream for eternity before realizing he doesn’t feel the thing’s skin, he’s separated from it by his gas mask,

and that’s when Bagger catches his own reflection in the monster’s glassy black eyes, and insight leaks in like chemical gas, this monster, flesh and blood, floating and fearsome, is merely mimicking what Bagger looks like, right here, right now, it has shaped its physical form in an attempt to put him at ease, it thinks this is what Bagger looks like now, big-eyed and snouted,

and Bagger pleads, “No, this isn’t me, it’s a mask,” and with his free hand grapples with the resin-infused cloth and spits the mouthpiece and wrangles the suffocating piece of crap off and can finally see clearly again, unimpeded by lenses, which makes the monster’s deformities all the more immediate, the slithery blinks of its adenoid eyeballs, the twitching hose of its muzzle,

and the monster cocks its head in apparent interest at Bagger’s latest physical change, and there’s a pause during which Bagger believes the circular orifice of its trunk distorts into a smile, before the monster brings a malformed hand to its face, pinches its own baggy cheek, and copies Bagger again by tearing its own face off,

and Bagger screams, probably, he’s no longer aware of his noises, the monster’s face comes off and jiggles in the monster’s hands like raw chicken breast, and then it’s gone, reabsorbed into the monster’s hand, which bloats in apparent digestion of the extra flesh,

and, yes, Bagger’s definitely screaming now, but it doesn’t last, for the monster’s olive fur reshapes and recolors into the red dress and blue cape, and its face returns to the one he’s come to know, that round, pale, peaceful, feminine face, the half-lidded eyes widened slightly as if to shush him, it’s all right, Cyril, everything is all right,

and her lips show no trace of the hideous trunk as they purse, and she speaks, she finally fucking speaks,

and what she says is, Do not be afraid,