x-x-x-x
You did not expect to die this way.
You were prepared for something like a deathly illness, for getting incurable cancer, for a car crash or a natural disaster or, though you were simply kidding around at the time, the end of the world or a full-scale zombie attack.
Perhaps those last few weren't so off the mark, though. Perhaps you weren't as prepared as you thought, and all of your plans fell apart and crumbled because you didn't account on knowing your attackers beforehand, albeit so discreetly. But here you lay, broken and bleeding and helpless, while the city around you burns and the piles of the dead keep getting higher.
The smell of sulfur stings your nose and your throat and your lungs, but you're dying, so you don't really care. Maybe in the past, you would've worried about inhaling the foul smog; but at the moment you simply could not care less. You are missing most of your torso. It feels odd knowing that it's inside of some creature right now. If you looked down, you could see your rib cage bare and exposed, gathering up dirt as you lay there in the streets.
You feel bored. You wonder when you're going to die.
But then... Then you see a familiar sight. Your vision is mostly shot, with black splatters around the edges, but one thing remains clear. One figure in the firelight, perched atop a flaming car with all the nonchalance in the world, gleaming black and white and red all over. She is made of sharp angles and sharper colours, her long bone fingers holding someone's hand as she feasts, red blood on white marrow. Her teeth are alarmingly sharp. She is beautiful.
You smile when you see her, and she smiles back; you don't blame her for what has happened. After all, you already knew what the outcome would be. When you saw what the mad prophets saw, heard the voices of a thousand angels, you knew how this would turn out. It's not her fault. It was simply time to start again.
Breathing shallow breaths of poison air, you croak to her, “Mary, Mary... How does your garden grow?” A familiar rhyme to your ears. There is blood in your throat and mouth, though you hesitate to spit it out, because then you might never stop.
The skin around her blank, black eyes crinkles up when she smiles. She leaps from the car like a spider, crouching back up when she hits the ground, all knees and elbows and too-long, too-thin limbs. She keeps the hand daintily held in her mouth.
“With silver bells,” she sings, her voice like a blender sifting through sand, “and cockle ssshells.”
She rests her foot on a skull as she walks towards you. You see that she's lost some feathers. Her wings are hardly the picture of beauty and grace you once saw- but you suppose that even angels have to get a little dirty when tilling the soil. “And pretty maids all in a row.”
Snap, goes the skull. She advances.
“That is how your garden grows,” you whisper, choking on your own blood. She crouches before you, and everything is painted orange and red with the raging inferno. “So this is what we've all been... Waiting for? This is our rapture?”
Her eyes are not unkind as they look upon you, and she presses one thin finger to your lips, silently urging you not to speak. You comply. She explains. “There is no rapture. There never was and there never will be- we are simply readying the garden for our next crops. You were a good lot. The next will be better.”
“Was that all that we were? All those years... All of our history and effort, was simply to feed-”
“You should not speak so much,” she says, sounding concerned. Her ashen face is stained with so much blood. “This is all just- jussst part of life. Our life. Imagine what we'll create next, if we created you from those animals.”
“Dinosaurs,” you remind her, simply out of habit, and she grins with raptor teeth.
“Dinosaurs. I wonder what the next ones will be like. We learned a lot from you humanss.”
The streets are silent, or as silent as they can be. There are no more cars racing about or police sirens, helicopters or screams. Everyone knows it's useless- and the screamers were the first to go, anyway. Above the city, night slowly gives way to dawn.
Your angel offers the hand to you. It's mangled and looks like the remains of a shark attack.
“You wouldn't want to stick around for Genesis anyway. It'sss boring.”
“I would like you to kill me, please,” you ask her. Her expression never changes. “I don't have much longer and I'd rather not die choking on my own bodily fluids, so if you please...?”
She nods, though she's not smiling now, and sits directly on your back with one hand over your heart. Her bones clink when they touch yours- both are sticky with red.
“I'll make you a ssserpent next time.
If we have them this time around. I know you'd like that.”
You can't see her from this angle, but you know she's grinning again, her black lips drawn wide and menacing. Everything about her is angles and edges, sharp enough to cut, and you would never have it any other way. Her laugh is made of pickaxes and razor blades as she caresses your heart.
“'Night, temptation,” is the last thing you hear, your angel's mouth pressed delicately to your ear.
It was not how you expected to die.
But you had few complaints, in the end.
)
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