Dandelion

Chapter 2 Sulfur and dust still clogged Ezekiel’s nose when the oily darkness retreated from his consciousness. Dirt was hot against his face and scrubs and bare forearms, almost to the point of blistering his skin. The air was scorching, an oven, lungs trying to seize as he panted into the gritty earth under his cheek. He cracked his eyelids open and got a peek of reddish dirt. There was ringing in his ears, punctuated by metal singing against more metal. Where the f**k was this? Seattle didn’t have this kind of…anything. The office he shared with his fellow nurses didn’t either. A grunt broke through the scrambled thoughts in his head. The crack of skin against bone followed. Something hit the ground close to him, the dirt spray hitting the backs of Zeke’s hands in sharp pings. Zeke itched to move, but his whole body screamed in protest as he thought about it. A fight was happening a handful of feet from his legs. His arms trembled as he tried to crawl out of the way. They wouldn’t take his weight and he collapsed back onto the dirt. Sounds tumbled around him like an oboe was played to mimic words close by. That didn’t make any damned sense. Another strident staccato of noise, rocks smashing against rocks, came from closer still. The air stirred. A hard screech of a car trying to stop before an inevitable collision overwhelmed everything, grated painfully through Zeke’s mind and ears. Absolute stillness followed; a complete void of any sound at all. Deep, buried instinct forced Zeke to stay put. The whole world held its breath. The oboe started up again, low and soothing instead of harsh bleats from a minute ago. Scorched air blew over him in waves. Cool skin touched his wrist. Zeke lurched away and rolled to his left side, a flash of green blinding his eyes. More notes poured into the air, but the touch didn’t return. It felt like someone hovered close to him. Zeke blinked away the afterimage of the green streak from his vision. The sky above wasn’t the cerulean blue he knew so well, it was a murky slate, stony. The clouds were missing too. He remembered that much. It was supposed to be a little cloudy today, white fluffy balls of cotton dotting the great blue. And cool. Where was he? Dirt shifted behind his back, where the green was. The unnatural quiet broke open with growled words Zeke couldn’t understand. He winced and tried to cover his ears from the sound. It didn’t help. The words sounded human enough, but there was a sharp edge to them, cutting against his awareness. Zeke gasped and sucked up some of the red earth under his face. “Stop,” he choked on the syllables and sputtered out a cough. More of the grit flew up, sticking against the sweat starting to bead on his skin under the heat. Another cool touch lighted on the nape of his neck, right above the collar of his cartoon-cat-covered green scrubs. The dusty feeling in his throat faded away. Words flowed through the air and made sense this time, though the instrumental quality hadn’t gone from the voice. “Enough, human.” It was eerie, the voice. Broad, full, deep with something he had never heard echoing underneath each word. Like the person was talking with a diaphragm the size of the ocean. Zeke craned his head up at last and took a good look around him, the desolate waste spread to the limit he could see. This wasn’t home. This wasn’t anything close to it. The sweat on his skin turned clammy and cold as panic ate at his insides. Maybe he’d woken up in the aftermath of a bombing. Wouldn’t there be more craters? Ruins? Air moved and Zeke twisted to his front, pushed up until he knelt in the reddish dirt. The slight breeze felt good on his sticky skin. He looked to the west, off on his left, and his mouth popped open. The moon hung heavy, perched right on the edge of the horizon like a giant globe of marble shot through with rills of silver. It was perfect and impossible for the moon to look like that. He easily made out Mare Imbrium and the Copernicus crater, traced the details with his eyes as though it were a picture on the wall. Near the base of the soft curve of the moon were little clumps of something, backlit. One of them was a painfully straight line, rising far above the rest of the shadows if they were together. Zeke scanned the horizon as his head swiveled around with an involuntary impulse and saw more rounded shadows in the distance. The speaker was not quite to his right, but he arrested Zeke’s attention immediately, framed by the burning sphere of the sun. Which didn’t hurt his eyes to look at. The person—Zeke wasn’t about to assume once he got an eyeful of the delicate face—was something he’d only seen in art books. Sort of. The chin was too strong for classical models and the eyes were green in a way only cats can achieve. But the person’s hair was a short braided rope of dull bronze and their skin was milky, too pale. They were also strong where Zeke could see the muscles strained under the person’s skin, though most of it was hidden under strange clothes. Billowing pants of drab red-brown and a square tunic out of an old science fiction show in the same color. The black boots were recognizable, at least. Wings though. Wings were different. There were two, one on each side, and the same milky white as the person’s skin. Faded, too, from the look of it. Zeke wasn’t sure if this person was well. After all, he was a trauma nurse, not a disease specialist, and not a vet by any stretch of the imagination, but if this one had walked into his hospital, he’d have sent them up to a doctor, because someone shouldn’t look so washed out. Wings snapped out to their full span in an instant and a sword appeared in the person’s hand as if it’d been conjured. The bright gold tip leveled right at Zeke’s heart. The panic he already harbored was at its peak, but the weapon did make Zeke’s brain freeze. “Who are you?” the creature grated. Frozen brain didn’t stop him. He’d worked under worse. “Zeke.” Easy answers. “Zeke Galison.” “Whose side are you on?” The person’s voice dropped into a discordant rumble. The sword didn’t wavier. “Side?” His brain stuttered against the frozen gears, but the damn thing wouldn’t work yet. This wasn’t a question he had an autopilot response for. “A luminary or kittim, which are you?” The stranger’s face changed from wary to wretchedly enraged. They stepped forward in a shuffle and the fingers on the hilt of the gleaming sword flexed, tightened until the skin was bone white. “Why did Maba pull you here?” Maba? Zeke shook his head at them. What was Maba? The person twitched their head to the side an infinitesimal centimeter. Zeke wanted to look, he did, but he eyed up this stranger for a good second more with a hard stare. It didn’t seem like they were going to stab him until they had answers. It wasn’t the first time Zeke trusted in the wrong person, but damn it, he had to know. A long pile of rags lay in the dirt to his right. Something black had been dropped close to the rags and more black pooled between the two points. Zeke’s stomach burbled with an unpleasant roll as he studied the thing. It was a face peeking out between folds in the fabric. The skin was split and blistered into a hideous shape, the mouth loosely open in death, cut back from the tips in a Glasgow grin. He jerked his gaze away from the dead thing. Maba he assumed and looked back to the person in from of him. “I don’t even know where here is,” Zeke insisted, pleaded. “And I don’t even know what this Maba is.” The sword point wavered then lowered as the stranger gave him a stern, narrow look. Relief shattered the ice in his brain and Zeke breathed in deep. The air smelled a little like saltpeter and honey. Zeke tried not to flinch away from the stranger as they reached out a hand for him. He managed to keep his reaction to straightening his spine in fear. He raised his hand to the person and was surprised when they jerked him to his feet. There was a shocking amount of strength Zeke felt in the grip. “You are being truthful,” the stranger muttered. Like they were disappointed Zeke was honest. “Who are you?” Zeke asked instead of the biting response he wanted to give. This was a stranger and they didn’t know he was always honest. They would learn if Zeke was here long enough. Wherever here was. The stranger stepped back and twisted their sword around until they slammed it home in a golden sheath strapped to the looped belts hidden among the folds of the shirt. Silence reigned for long seconds as Zeke watched the thoughts cross the stranger’s face like they were debating telling him even that much. Zeke gritted his teeth and waited. “Haziel, a luminary of the Cherubim, a Son of Light.” That answered two questions, at least. A man named Haziel. With wings, no less. And a regret that he should’ve listened more when his mother prattled on about angels. A hiccup of laughter bubbled up out of him. Should he bow or genuflect or something? An angel. s**t. There was a quizzical expression on Haziel’s face. It pulled the tips of his bow-shaped lips down into an almost frown and squinted his eyes. Zeke thought the expression made him look more drawn in the strange, blended light of the place. This brought him back to his original question. “Where am I?” “Abaddon,” Haziel answered. He glanced left, then right. The dull feathers fluffed and settled, a rainbow gloss rippling across the surface of them, which was a surprise. Maybe Haziel’s wings were dull because they were dirty from the fight? “We must move. The plain is too exposed for you.” Where would they go? It seemed like there was nothing for miles and miles in any direction Zeke looked, from the low moon behind him to the muted sun beyond Haziel’s right shoulder. Red dust farther than his eyes saw and little else. There was a faint outline of paler stone that ran from one celestial body to the other, but if Haziel didn’t mention walking it, maybe it wasn’t safe to use. Haziel pivoted, then walked sunward at a fast pace and Zeke scrambled on wobbly legs to keep up. Nothing was out in the dusty land, but the sun was right in his eyes. Something was strange about the sun though. Not right, like the moon didn’t seem quite right either. It hung low, exactly opposite the cool silver orb, set right on the rim of the world. A sort of filmy shroud hung over the burning star, blocking a lot of the light. Zeke assumed that was the case since he could look almost right at it and not have his retinas blinded like any other time of his life. Ten minutes in the sulfurous air, more like ten years to Zeke’s battered body, and his companion stopped dead in his tracks. This wasn’t a shelter of any kind, only more red dirt far as Zeke’s eyes could see. A soft whistle, a short tumble of notes down, and the air shimmered with glowing motes that fell away to the ground from the air. A fabric that almost matched the dirt was unveiled beneath each dying speck of light, like sand running between fingers, until a basic temporary lean-to was revealed. The canvas of it rustled with the tiny wisps of breeze ghosting across the barren land. The polished pole propping it open wasn’t any wood Zeke had ever seen before, though he had lived in forests all his thirty-five years. Haziel pulled back the front flap without a word and tied the bottom corner to a stake Zeke hadn’t noticed in his initial glance at the tent. The angel did the same thing on the other half of the front, then stood there looking at Zeke like he expected something. Zeke went with his first thought and shuffled into the shadowed interior. It wasn’t any cooler inside than out, but he didn’t have the strange double light beating at him anymore. The angel followed in after him but sat down right in the doorway. Zeke’s confusion must have shown on his face because Haziel gave him a pointed look and the rustle of feathers drew his eyes to the big cream-opal wings sort of cluttering up the entrance. They seem to have gotten cleaner as they walked from the corpse to the lean-to. The nod was an automatic thing, what Zeke did when he admitted he’d done or thought something boneheaded. He wanted to argue in his defense because he wasn’t used to dealing with wings on people, but how did he forget they were there? One of those kind of hard to miss things. “Now that we are protected, such as it is, what are we going to do with you?” A playful note was in Haziel’s voice. Nothing about this situation was funny, Zeke thought, but he wasn’t an angel either. Who knew what passed for humor among those types, but he did appreciate Haziel had lightened his mood. Zeke didn’t have to think about Haziel’s question at all. “I want to go home, so if you’ll point the way out of this hellhole, I’ll trot my ass right back to Seattle.” The second Haziel started to shake his head, he knew he wasn’t going to like what Haziel said next. “Even if I knew what this Seattle was, that is not possible. Humans are cut off from this place and there is no way for me to send you back.” “Why not?” A cold bubble of dread settled in Zeke’s chest. “You’re an angel.” Haziel frowned at him. “I thought you guys had a ton of power to do just about anything!” Haziel raised his hand and Zeke stopped his line of questions before he got rolling. It seemed as though his rescuer was in a debate with himself. The silence stretched for a few seconds longer before Haziel gusted out a sigh. “Once, before the battle began, I could have sent you home with little more than a thought. Too much power has been drained into this war and no luminary, or angel as you call me, has enough to do so anymore.” A rueful scowl etched onto Haziel’s soft mouth. “I am truly surprised Maba managed to drag a human here.” Overwhelmed, Zeke dropped his head into his cupped hands and dragged breath after shuddering breath in through his nose, out through his mouth. Calm. He needed calm. His skin felt cold and too damned tight in the blister hot air of the tent. The last thing he needed was a panic attack right in the middle of this mess, but his usual method to suppress it was unavailable, since running the wasteland was dangerous. Scotch was probably in short supply around these parts, too. Zeke smoothed out his breathing by the skin of his teeth, but it didn’t help the anxiety subside all that much. “How do I get home, then?” The hesitant frown on Haziel’s face didn’t inspire any confidence.