Chapter Text
“This seems pretty open and shut, don’t you think? I mean, I love the south in winter, but it’s pretty obvious we’re looking at a series of business-motivated homicides. Why’d they call us out here?” Zeller dusts his hands on his pants after removing his gloves. He straightens out and shrugs when his questions are greeted by silence. He continues, “Jimmy? You got nothing?”
“Nothing’s about right; there’s a pretty disturbing lack of forensic evidence at this scene, in contrast with the one we found last week. We’ve got ritualistic killings here and further down on Annunciation Street going back about a month. If it were open and shut, we probably wouldn’t have these guys,” Price says, primly, gesturing at the four crucified bodies being taken down from their mounts in the doorways throughout the lobby of Hotel St. Marie. “What about this exactly makes you think open and shut?”
“Okay, this crime scene is a bit harder to place, but that last one? The store owner was practically salivating over the bodies. We should interview him again. Jack?”
Jack looks down from the sky to Zeller’s expectant face and sighs. He says, “Going back to Lécuyer without a warrant and without the probable cause to get said warrant is harassment. You know this.” Jack points emphatically at Zeller and pulls out his phone to check the weather forecast. He hadn’t seen anything that morning about a storm, but the deep gray clouds overhead look ready to drop a blizzard down on their heads.
“I would bet money that guy did it,” Zeller mumbles under his breath as two gurneys roll past covered in the standard black body bags. Jack looks up for the last two and orders the rest of the techs still processing the scene to finish up and head to the lab set up on Bartholomew.
Beverly sidles up beside Jack and stuffs her hands in her coat pockets. She asks, “We’re not on a hurricane warning, are we?”
“Not the last I heard,” Jack murmurs, looking around at the storefront windows darkened and closed out for the night. “Doesn’t really look like weather, though, does it?”
“What do you think? Weird celestial event?”
“Nostradamus,” Price announces reverently. “It would be a little late according to cult speculation, but you can’t rush the universe, I guess.”
“You know what it reminds me of, actually?” Zeller angles his head to the side, glances momentarily at the bodies being loaded up in the vans, and declares, “The Second Coming.”
“The Rapture?” Jack muses, watching the layers of sky unfurl like smoke. “I don’t think so; I’m still here.”
“Ha-ha, you’re hysterical—” A flash of lightning disrupts Zeller’s response, and the booming thunder crack forces a full-body jump out of him. Startled, he cries out, “Oh, my God; it is the Rapture!”
“Brian, calm down.” Price steps off the sidewalk and rounds the few parked cars to stand in the middle of the blocked off street. Beverly goes to stand next to him, and Jack joins them to get a better look. The wind whips around the tar black vortex in the deep navy sky and lights through with another bolt of lightning.
“Do you think we should call this in?” Beverly asks uncertainly.
Jack doesn’t answer; he doesn’t have any kind of explanation for what’s happening. A few of the scattered techs wandering out of the hotel stop in their tracks. One of the women runs immediately for her car, crossing herself fearfully as she goes. Jack watches her go and calculates the possible outcomes for a situation such as the one they’re currently facing. Fear can make people panic; make them turn on each other.
He says, using his authoritative voice, “Whatever it is, we need to make sure no one gets hurt.”
“How do you suggest we do that when the thing is—Christ! Who knows what it is? We need to get the hell out of here,” Zeller pleads. He bumps Price’s arm with his and says, “Man, come on.”
“It’s just a storm, Brian. It’ll pass.”
“I have a bad feeling,” Zeller mutters, crossing his arms over his chest. As if to acknowledge his statement, another series of lightning bolts strikes the earth about a mile away, southeast of their location. One current of white-hot electricity fires down from the colorless, amorphous mist. A solid mass shoots through that pulsating livewire like a drop of water trickling down the length of a string.
Jack gets a bad feeling, too; a bad feeling like he isn’t close enough and that if he doesn’t get closer, they’re doomed.
“Beverly, get the car.” He hands her his keys and takes off running down the street. Over his shoulder he yells, to someone, “Bring a shovel.” He runs through the slow-falling snow, chest burning the closer he gets and the more the chilled winter air begins to taste and smell of ash. His feet take him around a bend after a few minutes, and he hears the roll of tires just behind him as he comes to a stop at the edge of a massive crater. Where the force of the object’s fall melted the snow, icicles have formed around the outermost rim of a giant hole in the scorched ground.
He looks out toward the end of the depression in the ground that extends to the frozen banks of the Mississippi River. Beverly shouts behind his shoulder. He only hears it over the ringing in his ears because the slamming car door wakes him out of his daze. He turns his head and looks. Zeller and Price are each tentatively carrying a shovel and staring disbelievingly at the crags surrounding the point of impact where the ground shot up in disagreement.
“This isn’t a good idea,” Jack vaguely hears Zeller saying to Price. He points his shovel at the spectacle just at Jack’s heels. “What are the odds we get radiation poisoning just by standing here?”
“Uh, well…” Price shifts his weight between each foot. “It doesn’t seem to be radiating anything anymore.”
Beverly steps around to Jack’s side and looks down into the crater, stepping that much closer so that she’s within the circle. She stops abruptly and staggers back. She says, “Jack, there’s someone down there.”
“Oh, if this is the Rapture, I am so royally screwed.”
Beverly jumps down into the crater, and Jack’s first thought is to yank her back by both arms. Protective instinct for one of his own taking over, he yells, too loudly, to be fair, “What do you think you’re doing? We don’t know what the hell it was that threw whoever’s down there down there.”
“He’s alive, Jack. I saw him moving.” She struggles out of his grasp easily. He hadn’t been trying that hard to detain her. “Stay here if you want, but I’m getting him out.” Beverly challenges him for a moment with her eyes, and Jack reluctantly relents.
She can’t be deterred, so Jack huffs, “Fine, but I take the lead. You stay behind me, you got that?”
Of course she does. She nods once, and Jack takes a flashlight out of his pocket. He steps where Beverly shows him to step so the unevenly decimated earth doesn’t crumble beneath his feet and send him pitching forward onto his face. She asks him, “Do you think we’ll need those shovels?”
“Yeah,” he replies. He reconsiders, not entirely certain where his answers have been coming from. He changes his mind and admits, “I don’t know.”
“Over there.” He follows the long straight line of her arm with the LED beam of his flashlight. It lights over a pale, bluish foot with curled up toes and a twitching ankle attached. He skims up the rest of the shivering, but mostly still figure to land on the face of a squinting, gasping ordinary man. His sooty palms clutch at his elbows, leaving smudgy fingerprints on his arms. A filmy, veiny layer of black covers his shoulders and part of his top half like an exoskeleton. His left leg allows him modesty enough to cover up his identifying sex markers, though his physical traits scream of a male. Beverly calls up to Price and Zeller, “Bring the shovels down here, now!”
Price complies straight away. Jack can see the other man hesitating to move from the spot where Jack stood a few moments ago. He wouldn’t be able to see the man immersed in the broken crevice of earth slowly filling with flakes of cold snow from there.
Beverly hands Jack the shovel and kneels down to the panicking man hyperventilating in his place. She says, soothingly, “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” He chokes down the erratic breaths racking through his chest and stares mutely her for a few long seconds before jerkily nodding his head. “My name is Beverly, and this is Jack. We’re going to get you out of here; we’re going to get you into some warm clothes and figure this out, okay?” The man nods his head frantically in understanding. “Can you tell me your name?”
He shivers audibly and whispers, throat raw and unused, “Mal’ak ha—” He turns his face away from the light as much as he can to wheeze violently. The adrenaline pumping through his body from the fall visibly drains out of him in shuddered waves. Jack kicks the blade of the shovel into the earth beside his leg, and the man exclaims, wordless and terrified. Spasms shake through his terse, quaking body, evident of an obvious, exponential spike in physical pain.
“Hey, hey, look at me. Look at me.” Beverly grabs the man’s attention before Jack continues to work at the packed in dirt and glassy ice trapping the man under. He looks up to see Zeller talking animatedly on the phone. Price clambers down into the crater with them carrying the other shovel. “They’re getting you out. You just watch me.” He nods his compliance but still flinches when the shovels break through the sediment adhered to his body like glass from the touch of the lightning as it struck. “You were telling me your name.”
“Mal’ak ha-mashḥit,” he mumbles. “It’s Mal’ak ha-mashḥit.”
Price turns his head toward Jack and whispers, “Jesus, what language is that, Arabic?”
“Could be, or Hebrew.”
“The ambulance is on its way,” Zeller shouts from his safety on level ground.
“Do we have blankets in the car? Or clothes,” Price shouts back. “We need something to cover him with.”
Zeller looks back to the car and then down into the crater. He says, “There’s a blanket in the trunk. Do you need me to go down there, or…?”
In the way of giving him an out, Price hedges, “We only have the two shovels.”
Beverly whispers something encouraging to the man where she’s crouched at his shoulder. Across from her, Jack and Price gently chisel away at what could be this man’s tomb if he stays for a few minutes longer with how cold the air is; the snow and the light breeze do little to help. Jack’s hands already feel stiff through his gloves, so he can’t imagine how the man feels, so exposed and vulnerable. He hears sirens caterwauling faintly in the distance, probably five minutes away, if that. Jack hands his flashlight off to Zeller as he stumbles down into the pit.
“Oh, my God,” he whispers, taking in the sight and accidentally flashing the man in the eyes the way Jack did. He jerks away from the light and subsequently yanks the lower half of his body out of its temporary prison in the icy dirt and char. A sharp silence befalls the four of them. Only the sounds of the man gasping and whimpering at the cold fills the echo of the crater several feet deeper than gravediggers typically bury caskets.
The singed flaps of translucent membrane that begin at his back bleed steadily and emit a clear, mucous fluid as the appendages quiver feebly. A quiet, pacific moment stutters into disorder as the burnt butterfly wings the size of the man’s entire body sizzle at the frayed tips and slowly burn away as easily and as decadently as a photograph under a cruel flame.
The man moans miserably and grabs Beverly’s arm in his hand as the melted cartilage and skewered bones at his back dissolve into scraps of torn flesh and cinder. He buries his face in his arm and screams, a baying howl that pierces Jack in the center of his being. The shovel in Price’s hand clatters uselessly to the ground, and he twists out of his coat to tuck it around the freed, writhing man’s nearly hypothermic body.
“Help me, help me, help me,” he chants under his breath, lifting a heavy arm over his neck. Beverly lifts his legs, and Zeller and Jack climb out to the surface to lift him out. Zeller walks the lethargic, clumsy man toward the car, and Jack stays behind to help Price and Beverly out of the crater. The sirens are close now. Deciding, Jack says, “Get him into the car.”
“Wait, what?” Zeller stops and turns, barely managing to hold the man upright and keep him decent at the same time. Price hurries to his side and adjusts the coat so it covers the man’s frail, weakened body more appropriately. His head lolls forward onto his chest, and his knees give out beneath him. Price steadies him and rubs the heat trapped in the material into his arms to get the circulation flowing better. Zeller adjusts the weight on his shoulder. “What do you mean? The ambulance is nearly here.”
Jack deadpans, “You want him to stand after what he’s been through?” Zeller ducks his head and with Price’s help, gets the man situated in the backseat of the car with the heat going. To Beverly, he asks, “Did he say anything to you?”
“He said something about a will.”
“Whose will?”
“He just said, ‘his will be done.’ I don’t know, Jack. He was kind of incoherent on account of having plummeted to the earth in a lightning bolt and almost freezing to death.” He looks at her and can’t tell if she’s trying to make a joke. It’s pretty funny if she is; it’s Goddamn hilarious.
“I’m worried what’ll happen to him at the hospital.”
“We’re the police,” she says, shrugging her shoulders with a deceptive air of nonchalance. He doesn’t buy it, but he’s every bit as worn out as she’s trying not to be, so he doesn’t argue. The flashing red and blue lights illuminate the buildings across the street. They’re seconds away. Assertively and reassuringly, she tells him, “If they want to pull something, we have jurisdiction and authority. Don’t worry about him, Jack. He’ll be okay.”
Jack nods once and watches the man curl into himself in the backseat of his rented Sedan. He bumps his head on the window and doesn’t stir; he just soaks up the heat of the car and of Price’s coat wrapped tightly around him. There’s no telling if Price means to keep it after tonight since a completely naked man who rode down to earth on lightning is currently swathed in it. He and Zeller are leaning against the passenger side door, eyes resolutely watching the indigo canvas of the chilly night sky in the French Quarter. Jack looks, too, at all those stars peeking out with the passing of the violent thunderstorm.
He drops his eyes and finds the man in the car staring out at him from behind the back window. Even at a distance, Jack feels like he can see the stars in those wide, blue eyes; like some greater mystery than even that of the way in which he found his way to them lays dormant within that unassuming body that only walked and talked like a human man. He has to be so much more than that to have even survived the last ten minutes of this impossible night as crazy a thought as it is, never mind where he was before the storm brought him.
He asks Beverly, “What did he say his name was?”
“I think Moloch? Uh, or no, it was longer than that. Could have been another language?”
“Maybe.” He watches the lights flicker around the corner at last and waves down the driver before signaling to Zeller to get the man out of the car. A handful of paramedics trickle out the back of the ambulance. A fire truck rounds the corner after them, and a few workers immediately scour the crater for signs of the fire that burned the earth.
A bulky man in the standard EMT uniform announces, “We’re answering a call for a trauma victim?”
Jack waves them over to the car, and Price and Zeller heft the man up and out. Naturally, he objects some at having to go back into the cold, but he follows instructions and lets the paramedics drag him onto a stretcher to wheel him into the ambulance, coat floundering in the wind that’s begun to pick up since the storm that brought him passed through. He panics when they try to stick the oxygen on his face.
“Beverly,” he cries out. He strikes out at the paramedic closest to him with the tank, and Jack stands in the path of his feebly kicking legs. Beverly rushes to his side and holds his hand. “I want to go home,” he whispers from behind the oxygen mask when he calms down enough for them to get it over his mouth. “I want to go home, Beverly…” He sinks into the gurney, exhausted, and closes his eyes. His fingers remain limply tied to Beverly’s.
“I’ll ride with him,” she says quietly to no one in general. Her words seem to remind everyone else that they need to move the man and get him into the ambulance.
One of the EMTs staggers back out of the vehicle after loading the unconscious man in to ask Jack, Zeller, and Price collectively if they saw what happened to him. Zeller blurts out, “He got struck by lightning.” He points to the gaping crater that thankfully only a few people have come out to inspect so far. “Lit him up like a Roman candle; we had to dig him out of the snow.”
“Out of the earth’s crust, you mean,” the paramedic says somewhat skeptically. She walks to the jagged curve of the wide but perfectly circular hole in the ground. She turns back around. “Look, if he’s on any drugs, I really need you to tell me. You won’t get into any kind of trouble.”
“He’s not on drugs,” Jack says, pulling out his official tone of voice. He pulls out his credentials and handing her a business card with his name on it, says, “If there are complications at the hospital, you report it to us, you got that? We don’t need his picture circulating in every tabloid magazine before morning as the guy who fell from the sky.”
“Because that would be ridiculous,” Price scoffs, shaking his head. Zeller gives him a look, and they shuffle off toward the car. Jack watches Beverly in the ambulance with the man’s hand held in both of hers; a curious, unreadable expression makes its home on her face.
The paramedic looks over his card, tucks it into her wallet, and asks, “Do you at least know his name?”
“Um, he said…” Jack tries really hard to recall what the man told them but can’t place the foreign syllables in his mind. He can’t draw it out of his memory, but he can’t let the man go nameless and unknown.
He said, his will be done.
“Sir?”
“Uh, Will. He said it was Will.”
She nods and traipses back to the ambulance and up the ramp. She tells him, “We’re taking him to Interim LSU.”
Jack walks to the sidewalk where a small crowd of people has gathered to gawp at the wreckage just behind him. He waves at them to step back and make way for the ambulance to pass through; while directing foot traffic, he gets out his cell phone and dials ‘7’. It rings twice.
“It was just a lightning storm, ladies and gentlemen. There’s nothing to see here.” Into his phone, he says, “Bowman, we’ve got a situation needs containing at Woldenberg Park. I’ll let you in on the details later. Right now I need a perimeter set up from Dumaine to Canal Street.”
He waves at Zeller to start the car and covers the receiver when he says, “Interim LSU.”
On the other line, Bowman says, astonished, “You’re just down the street. What happened?”
“Just get down here, Lloyd. Bring a unit; we’ve got an audience, and something that you’re just not going to believe until you see it for yourself.”
He hangs up his phone, and Price rolls his window down. Out the window, he asks, “You’re going to stay?”
“Yes.” Jack nods his head, walking alongside them as Price gives Zeller the okay to start driving. Jack clears a path for them through the steadily growing throng of people that the storm had kept indoors for the greater part of the ordeal. “If you can’t find Beverly at the hospital, ask for a man named Will admitted with lesions and being treated for electric shock.”
Price sticks his head farther out the window when Jack falls slightly out of step with them. He repeats, “Will?”
“I couldn’t remember his real name, shoot me.”
Price nods and looks over his shoulder. Jack looks, too. The people are slowly moving in to inspect the disturbed ground. The firefighters now on the scene direct them to stay back.
“We’ll see you there then.”
Jack watches them go and then resumes his post alongside the uniformed firefighters in between the people and the object of their current fascination and awe. He flashes his badge to one of the higher ranked workers, and they cooperate with him fully. He stands stark still with his hands behind his back and waits for Bowman to come with the unit. The black has cleared completely from the sky and left only a deep purplish blue expanse of nightfall and a slew of pale gray clouds of ice and air in its wake.