This Rifle Was The Devils Favorite. He Slew Legions Of Angels With It In The War Of Heaven, Hungry Golden

This rifle was the Devil’s favorite. He slew legions of angels with it in the War of Heaven, hungry golden bullets that could crack universes and turn concepts into meaningless bundled words. It is beautiful. Metal so black it’s almost blue, refined onyx overlaid with silver, ivory.

You pulled it from dead hands. Victorious.

It feels perfect— familiar. Like an old friend. The sinking Sun descends and throws warm red light over everything, drowns this world in blood.

Somewhere deep down inside, you can’t help but feel that this weapon, this rifle— has been waiting for you.

Does anybody else get really antsy when they’re feeling lonely? I don’t know how to stop feeling like this. I have trouble sitting still, I endlessly scroll, I go back and forth in my mind. Dunno what to do.

I was just a boy. A young mind brimming with questions in a small town tucked away from the world by lonely willow-choked roads and thick swamps. Seems so long ago.

I remember the reverend, all red-faced and swollen above me, like an ugly moon. Angrier words that lashed out at the room beyond him, turned the crowd to a thrall with answers that even as a kid I knew were unsatisfactory. My mind knew only a future where it seemed that Man had triumphed over God. Man had walked on the Moon, and Man had split the atom for its Promethean gifts. Where was God, I had asked, completely serious, inside a Saturn V, or an H-bomb?

The lashings my father gave me for this heresy were not at all delivered in the form of sermon.

I still remember the day. Claustrophobic heat that drains your muscles. Turns every breath shallow lest you drown in humidity and sorrows. I skipped church now regularly, slipping away into all consuming greenery. My worn bag stuffed with the essentials for any young would-be apostate: warm bottles of Coke, smuggled turkey sandwiches, books about men trudging on red Martian sands, and a fishing pole. Perfect.

Somewhere far away cracked thunder as I caught glimpses of nasty thunderhead clouds between bayou canopy. Deep within me stirred superstitious fear of righteous lightning to drop me dead— but I pushed it away and continued the track, eager to pluck anything from the river. Each step through the muck lessened my worry, whistling.

The sky darkened. Deepened into bruised, ominous darkness. I felt the thunder in my belly. I grew frantic as any boy would, bravado and cheer as banished as the sun had been. Crashing through brush, trying to retrace my steps— something exploded. I was thrown. I could feel the heat of flame, sense fire in some primeval heart within my being as it sprang, ferocious and eager. Through half lidded eyes I glimpsed inferno. Struggled. Fought to stand.

I ran.

I hit something. Hard. Landed in the muck right on my rear just as rain began to pelt the good earth in droves. Lightning split the sky’s imitation of night, I scrambled, and looked up.

It was a woman. Tall as any man I’d ever met. Skin pale like moonlight, and hair pristinely golden and long, rippled with crimson wildfires and blue moss. Crowning her head were perfect, black antlers, elegant and regal. She was bare. My heart thudded in tandem to the storms song, and I was stuck fast, enraptured. Silvered eyes watched me— looked beyond me. To something I can’t possibly understand.

We started at one another. She tilted her head, just slightly. All around us the world creaked and groan as hungry wildfire snatched up everything in sight, turned all things living to choking ash. She was unfazed. Serene. I wept silent tears. Unblinking.

And then, without a sound, without so much as a breath— a single upheld pale hand closed, and the fire was gone. Thin, blackened trees whispered in the faintest breeze. Impossible. A miracle.

The woman— the goddess?— looked down at me in the mud. The silver eyes, a faint smile, and with quiet footsteps, disappeared into the tangle.

I’ve told no one else of this in my sixty years of life. Who would believe an old man about his forest savior? The fire was unwitnessed by anyone when I scrambled back into town, and my only greeting was a cuff on the head for missing another service.

My property, my home— it’s there. Built at the place I first witnessed something beyond explanation. And every night, under the rain or unblinking stars, I sit out on the deck, amidst a chorus of singing creatures shrouded in shadow. Waiting.

Hoping.

*”Please keep all hands and in feet inside the ride at all times! Please do not—“*

Conrad and Lucy didn’t pay any attention. The Time Cadillac ride always started the same way. And they were too busy all over each other, submerged as deep in youthful needs as the Cadillac was submerged in deep time. Conrad was already kissing Lucy again, breathless and with too much saliva as the slick, black car slowly rolled over a desolate landscape that would’ve fit Hell or the airless Moon than Earth. Lucy ran her hands through her boyfriends short, combed brown hair, feeling the car lurch a little. Far away came lightning flashing beneath cataclysmic looking clouds all purple, bruised, and furious looking. She caught glimpses jagged landscape burbling, saw the eerie monoliths of volcanic happenstance which poured streamers of superheated gases into impossibly thin air. For a full threat minutes they rode over different variations: fire, ice, black blistering sands— even a sea bottom, flat and dark, with a single earthwide ocean far above.

*Boring.*

Conrad pressed a hand to Lucy’s thigh and she shivered just as they emerged onto land, felt humid air over her skin as kisses pattered themselves on an exposed throat like so much intimate rainfall. This place was disgusting: impenetrable swamps dominated by huge armored vegetable spires, encrusted with moss and lichen, and haunted by sprawling insects so massive that no matter what Father Martin would say it seemed downright ungodly that any Creator worthy of worship could’ve made them. Fingers brushed an innermost thigh, probing, just as their slow passage brought an automobile sized centipede to eye level. Arthropleura rose in undulating waves as cascades of armored legs cracked themselves against its plated sides, a dozen angry red chitinous sides. It was Conrad who yelped in fear, wide eyed and stupid, one hand thrown up against the monster of yesterday. Human hearts beating fast, beating hard.

Apocalypse thrown across supreme desert like a deathly blanket. Lucy just saw bones— miles and miles of bones, discarded skeletons that went on across eerie dark colored dunes. Sharp, ozone tinged air took an effort to breathe. God only knew what lived here. Was whatever had survived even lucky? Could it be considered *luck* to live here, in this silent world, a sun scorched wasteland dominated by the silenced dead? It chilled any motion between them. They huddled close. Quiet. Would this fate befall Man, would the fatal blessing of the atom undo everything.. usher us back into a final, silent world?

Giants sprouted up from ruin. Fast, fleet-footed things that in ample opportunity became behemoths, titans. An age of Olympian reptiles with no bounds. They grew, fought, lived, died. Mountains that walked, shield-faces that battered and slammed, clubbed tails that concussed. Lucy watched the very first flowers bloom: elegant purple splashed over white petals.

Conrad reached.

Something buckled, something bent. No trespassing. A cosmic reprimand that even here in this imaginary space would not and could not be allowed. It all happened in a moment. The Time Cadillac protested just barely, hissing faintly. Then nothing.

They stared. Mesozoic countryside stretched out into warm, evening sunshine. Skyscrapers redwoods loomed above ginkgos, cycads, ferns in majestic immensity, and threw thick shadows on grassless ground. Conrad felt his mouth go dry. Ancient mammalian fear rose from primordial memory.

Something roared in the gloom.

The Thing That Came in Summer

The world changed. Boundaries shivered. Something that had been *right* became *wrong*, just for a moment, just long enough for the slightest passage. No fanfare, no drama, no lights and catastrophe. Just the motion. Just the transition. Easy. Simple. Welcoming.

The world slid around the visitor like so much smooth water becomes glassy and transparent moving quickly across river stones. Sharp-edged shards appeared suddenly— some breakage would always occur— but then it was over. Unnoticed.

This place was like the last one. A warm, comfortable night. Moonlight thrown down from a crescent slash across verdant growth, murmuring water not far away. Voices, maybe, but hidden as small living things sang their final climactic choruses in the omnipresent dusk. The *hum-hiss-chirps* came everywhere. In a multitude of directions.

*Opportunities*. All of them.

The thing lay still. Unmoving from its arrival. An impossible chill radiated off of the strange, glossy shell in shimmering waves. Steaming faintly like so much unnatural foggy streamers. Anyone nearby would’ve noticed their breath despite June heat. But already, icy tendrils and summoned flakes were dissipating, leaving only wet traces here and there, exposing the thing.

It tasted the air. Unseen cracks and pores flexed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Scented growth, sensed heat, tasted motion. Unnatural senses unfurled in an eerie kaleidoscope. Somewhere at the core of thing came excitement. Eagerness.

Something dark and wet shivered. Shook, slightly.

There were voices now— close. Everything else had fled away into the incoming darkness, birds flittered and squirrels dodging, insects silenced and stilled. So the voices came. Close. The thing had no need to detect their joy, no desire to catch the flirtatious tones. Words meant nothing but signifiers of life, mind, and potential.

The bodies neared. They shone warm, bright as stars, vivid with pheromones and heat. The thing spied deeper, elated at glimmering brain waves and lightning neuron-linkages, all awash in so many dancing colors. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings. Innate, ancient drives that were beautiful, striking. But they paled compared to the thing, felt tiny and childish to it’s own singular drive, the final purpose that even now came in increasing waves.

*So close*.

But the thing had to wait. Kept itself tidy, tight. Moonlight and sunset vestiges glinting in cool, cold rivulets across its chitinous exterior.

The voices were close.

Closer.

Closer.

Just *there*, just at the edge. They mingled and tangled, brought so much rising into the air. The thing knew it could not fight it’s instincts any longer.

It shivered. Shook.

And grew.

On Dark Wings

A knock at the door.

It’s him.

Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again.

It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings.

The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat..

I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is caught and silenced as if it were a small pathetic thing quickly extinguished. His hands are pale spiders. I have seen them everywhere, reaching into my windows and retreating under my bed, I know their too-smooth texture, remember the ease with which I am subdued, carried, hoisted.

We are outside now. In the Forest. It should be dark but there is light, so much light, and it hurts to be beneath, an appalling brightness that brings out bottomless animal fear. Heat across my body. The probing, painful digit brushes my heart. Flexes across my spine.

His sunglasses are eyes. Huge, black spheres around an inhuman face. His coat becomes wings, black cataclysmic wings.