Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Destiny’s friend, Anselmo, picked me up from the airport in an old Ford truck. Then he drove me to his ranch a few miles outside of Albuquerque, where Destiny had been staying with him, trying to stay out of sight.
“Destiny posted the Heaven.exe videos online yesterday,” he told me. “A few of them went viral. Lots of people are calling them fake, though.”
He chewed gum while he talked. I stared at his tattooed hands on the steering wheel. A skull on one, a spider on the other.
“Has Reid commented on them yet?”
“He’s been quiet. But I think he’s got bigger things to worry about right now. He’s back in New Mexico. Me and Destiny saw him over at the old Parallax Medical building a few weeks ago.”
He turned onto the dirt road that led between a few fields filled with clumps of dead grass and cracked, dry dirt.
At the end of the road, I saw an adobe house with chipped tan plaster and exposed wood beams. Destiny sat on the porch, underneath the sheet of rusted aluminum that extended from the house’s roof.
As soon as Destiny saw me, she hugged me. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she said.
“I didn’t either.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for in Kandahar.”
“At least we know what Chazaqiel is trying to do now.”
We went inside Anselmo’s house. Near the door, a few faraday bags hung from key hooks. Then, near the closet, were two bug-out bags packed with supplies. Every window was covered with tinfoil.
Anselmo got three beers out of his fridge and then we all sat down in the living room.
“Anselmo told me Reid’s at the Parallax building,” I said.
“We saw him bringing some equipment in there,” Destiny said. “Freezers, incubators, stainless steel cabinets. This morning, someone claiming to be a bioengineer at Apotheosis Labs messaged me to say Reid had created a new Cas enzyme that can rewrite human DNA. They sounded really freaked out. They wanted me to help get the truth out.”
“Do you think Reid’s getting ready to test it on himself?” Anselmo asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure he has a few guinea pigs lined up first.”
“Like you?”
Destiny laughed but then realized it wasn’t really that funny. She drank the last of her beer and then said she was going to bed.
That night, I dreamed I was walking through a circus tent in Marchetti’s Palace of Wonders again. Chazaqiel stood on the freak show stage, flapping his wings while people watched in horror.
Then Chazaqiel saw me and walked towards me. The other people froze with their jaws still hanging open.
“Reid is just a stepping stone,” Chazaqiel told me. “A proxy variable. Human blood is too different from ours, too different from God’s.”
“You’re testing it, though? This new enzyme you’ve created?”
“We’re testing the transformation, yes, but it hasn’t been going well. We need you, Vadym. Your blood is still pure. You’re not like the rest of us. Sin hasn’t ruined you yet.”
“I’m not going to help you.”
“You are, though. I don’t care what Yevun thinks. You’re mine. You’ll always be.”
I woke to Destiny screaming. I ran into her room.
Chazaqiel loomed over her bed, his wings pressed against the ceiling.
He grabbed Destiny’s arms. She kicked at him, trying to push him away, but he was too strong. He lifted her off the bed.
“Let go of her!” I yelled.
“Her life for yours, Vadym.” Chazaqiel said. “What do you think? A fair trade?”
Anselmo ran into the room with a shotgun. He fired a round of buckshot at Chazaqiel’s back. The buckshot tore into his skin, splattering black blood across the floor.
Before the blood had even dried, the wounds on Chazaqiel’s back had disappeared, his body quickly healing itself.
“I saw your videos,” he told her. “Not that smart.”
“Fuck you!” she yelled.
He dragged Destiny toward the front door. Anselmo and I ran after him and tried to pull Destiny away.
Chazaqiel flung Anselmo across the room, as if he were tossing a doll.
“If you want me, take me now,” I said. “Leave Destiny here.”
“We’re not ready for you yet,” he said. “Come back to where you found me, and I’ll let her go.”
I ran at him again, but he tossed me to the side of the room, too.
He dragged Destiny outside, spread his wings and carried her up into the sky.
Anselmo sat up against the fireplace, blood leaking from his arm.
“Are you ok?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine. Where is he taking her?”
“To the basement of the Parallax Labs building. The same place where I found him before.”
“We need to call the police.”
“And tell them what? They’ll never believe us. Reid will deny everything, too.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Do you think you can get your hands on some explosives?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“Whatever they’re building, we need to destroy it. We need to make sure their enzyme doesn’t leave the lab. Because if it does, this world isn’t going to exist anymore.”
Anselmo had some cousins who worked in demolition. He reached out to them and, without saying too much, they agreed to sell us some C-4 demolition blocks. They just made us promise we wouldn’t say where we got them from.
Even though we were both worried sick about Destiny, we took a few days to prepare.
We’d both go into the building. I’d head down to the lab while Anselmo set the explosives. Then, as soon as Destiny was safe, Anselmo would set the C-4 off.
“What if you’re still in the lab?” he asked me.
“My life’s over anyway. I’ll keep one of the blocks of C-4 strapped to my chest, wired to your detonator.”
Anselmo and I drove to the Parallax building late Thursday night. A few white vans were parked in the parking lot. Fluorescent lights flickered in the office windows.
We parked on the street and then took the duffel bags of C-4 out of the trunk and carried them toward the building.
“If you see anything come out the building,” I said, “anything that doesn’t look human, it doesn’t matter whether me and Destiny are safe, you need to set the bombs off.”
“I know.”
The doors to the building had been left unlocked. They were waiting for us.
The cubicles I’d seen before were gone. The whole first floor had been cleared out. All that was left were the grey carpeting and the dull tube lights.
Anselmo was terrified. Pale white and shaking. But he got to work right away, finding the support beams and placing the C-4.
I found the stairs near the elevator and headed downstairs to the lab.
Walking down the stairs, I felt the same wrongness I’d felt before. The air was thick and hard to breathe. My skin itched with static electricity.
The storage rooms had been filled with glass cabinets, freezers, frost-covered metal tanks, and DNA sequencing machines.
The door to the sub-basement had been left wide open, its lock still broken.
I thought about the last time I was in the basement, kneeling next to the door with a drill, slowly drilling the lock out, scared out of my mind. I didn’t want to believe I’d find him but, at the time, I knew I would.
Deeper in the basement, I heard someone moaning in pain. Their voice was deep. Guttural.
I walked down the next set of stairs, into the labs.
Black lights shone from the hallway ceiling. I walked into the first lab.
The lab’s walls were lined with glass containers. Inside the containers, human organs floated inside pink fluid, pulsing next to copper wire.
Hearts beat like they were pumping blood. Lungs expanded like they were inhaling air.
I turned on my flashlight and shone it over the glass vials on one of the shelves. The labels were a mix of English and Italian. A few were labeled with names I recognized from The Book of Enoch. CHAZAQIEL-7, RAMIEL-2, BARAQIJAL-1.
I walked into the next room. At the center of it, a surgical table was surrounded by a ventilator and IV lines. The IV lines were connected to something in the corner. An enormous ball of flesh with six legs and six arms.
It moaned in pain. The same moans I’d heard from upstairs.
Walking forward, I bumped against a metal chair.
“Who’s there?” the flesh ball asked.
It used its legs to roll itself into the light. It had ears, a nose, and a mouth, but no eyes.
The nose looked so familiar. The mole on the right nostril.
The mouth.
“Is that you, Alexei?” I asked.
“Vadym?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
He laughed. “You led them right to me. Right to my house. They threatened me. Swore they’d go to the police. They’d let it all go, though, if I agreed to help test their new drug. It was safe, they promised, it just wasn’t legal. They needed someone they could trust to keep their mouth shut.”
He rolled closer toward me, pushing his body with his legs, knocking over the metal chairs and canisters.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. “The drug wouldn’t change me. It was just supposed to make me a stronger, healthier version of myself.”
He laughed. His mouth widened, becoming so large it looked like he was turning himself inside out.
Saliva sprayed out from inside his body, splattered across the floor.
“I know I’m different now, I can feel it, but I can’t see what they’ve done.”
He rolled forward again, and he tried to grab me with his arms.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“I want to feel you. Come closer. Let me touch your face.”
“Stay away from me, Alexei.”
I backed away, moving closer to the door.
Alexei rolled forward again. “I just need one of your eyes. Just for a minute. Just to see what they’ve done to me.”
He lunged at me this time, and he managed to grab hold of my wrist with one of his hands.
His other hands grabbed onto me, too. My legs, my arms, my throat, my hair. Then he began to feel my face.
“Stop it.”
“Just one eye, Vadym. Just for a second. I need to see what I am. I need to see if I’m still here.”
“Stop it, Alexei!”
He dug his fingers into my eye socket. I screamed in pain. But then I remembered what I’d done before.
I thought of my mother, barely unconscious on the floor of my apartment, so high she was barely able to move. Then that man who crawled on top of her. That dirty, skinny man. I watched her, helpless, wondering why me? Why of all the lives God could have given me, why did he give me this one?
I moved the sadness from my brain into my heart, and I turned myself to fog.
Alexei’s hand passed through my head. He rolled forward and then ran his hands over the wall, searching for me. “Where did you go, Vadym?”
I moved forward to the hallway at the other end of the room.
“This is your fault, Vadym! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened to me!”
I guess it was my fault, in a way. But it was also his fault, too. If I hadn’t gone to prison, I never would have met Reid. If I hadn’t met Reid, I would have never found Chazaqiel.
But none of it seemed random. Everything was filled with patterns. But even though I saw the patterns, I still couldn’t predict what would happen next. What would happen to Alexei? What would happen to all of us?
The hallway brought me deeper into the lab, to the same room where I’d found Chazaqiel before, bolted to the wall with wire embedded in his muscles.
This time, bolted to the wall, rather than Chazaqiel, I saw Reid. Or what he’d been turned into.
Reid’s neck had been elongated. His head had been deformed to resemble a bird’s head with a long beak. His stomach protruded like he was pregnant. I could see both male and female sex organs between his legs.
He moaned in pleasure, impregnating himself.
Across from him, Chazaqiel stood with two other angels. Like Chazaqiel, the angels’ skin had blackened, the feathers had rotted off their wings, their faces had become skull-like.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” one of the angels asked.
“What should we call them?” the other asked.
“The God of Wombs,” Chazaqiel said. “The God of Human Creation.”
“Where’s Destiny?” I asked.
They all turned toward me. A smile spread across Chazaqiel’s face.
“You finally came,” he said. “You arrived just in time, too, to see our new creation. Our new God.”
“You told me if I came here, you’d let her go.”
“I will, in good time, but let me introduce my friends first, Kokabiel and Sariel.”
The angels watched me with empty eyes, curious.
“He’s the pure one?” Kokabiel asked.
“He was just born a year ago,” Sariel said. “Before him, there hasn’t been a birth since Annika in 1962 in Sweden.”
“We’re growing older,” Chazaqiel said. “It’s becoming harder to reproduce. No doubt, God doesn’t intend anything but God to live forever. But we’ll change that.”
Reid’s moans became louder. His eyes flickered and then became solid black.
The walls of the room began to distort. The room became larger, then extremely small, and then the ceiling turned in circles as if it had disconnected from the walls.
“What’s happening?” Sariel asked.
“I think our new God is giving birth,” Chazaqiel said.
Reid’s stomach expanded, falling to the floor and spreading across the tiles.
The walls of the lab cracked. Black water poured through the cracks, pooling on the floor.
Black water dripped from Reid’s genitals, too. He threw his head back in ecstasy.
Suddenly, I was lying in bed in my old apartment. Destiny lay next to me. Both of us were naked.
“Vadym?” she asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. I was alone somewhere, in a dark room, and then I was here.”
“It’s Reid, I think. Did you see what they did to him?”
“No.”
“They’ve given him the enzyme.”
We got out of the bed. Destiny tried opening the bedroom door, but it was shut tight.
The walls of the bedroom began to dissolve.
“This can’t be real,” she said. “This is a dream.”
The floor disappeared, and we fell through the darkness. As we screamed, our screams echoed, fading into nothingness.
I don’t know how long we fell for. Minutes, days, hours.
But then we fell into an endless expanse of black water.
The cold water woke us up. Snapped us back to reality.
We flailed our arms, trying to keep our heads above the water, as the waves washed over us.
“Vadym!” Destiny yelled.
The water pulled her away from me. I reached out and grabbed onto her arm.
“What do we do?” she asked.
I looked around us. In the distance, I saw a small island.
“There,” I said, and I pointed at it.
We swam toward the island.
It seemed very far away, but nearly as soon as we started swimming, we were crawling up onto the sand.
Beautiful men and women lay naked on the shore, suntanning their bodies. Destiny and I walked past them, toward the trees, when there was a loud crash behind us. We turned and saw Reid rising from the water, transformed into an enormous, phallic serpent, his face carved into the glans.
“Do you see this?” he asked us. “My own world? Everything you see ripped from my brain.”
He moaned again. Mountains shot upward from the water. Within a few seconds, the island disappeared, and Destiny and I were left standing in a desert valley.
Reid sank into the sand and then reappeared as a swollen face in the clouds.
A herd of half-formed buffalo raced toward us.
“We need to get out of the way, or they’ll kill us,” Destiny said.
We took shelter behind a rock. The herd of buffalo trampled past us, shaking the ground.
As soon as they passed, the mountains distorted, growing and shrinking, finally exploding into a cloud of diamonds.
The diamonds scattered through the black void, transforming into a diamond palace.
Reid sat on a throne, looking just like he had before, wearing a gold crown on his head.
“You’ll worship me,” he said. “You’ll do everything I tell you. Get on your knees.”
“What have you done to yourself?” Destiny asked.
He forced her to her knees. Then he stood and walked toward us. “You too, Vadym.”
He forced me to my knees as well, and then he laughed at us.
The walls of the palace began distorting, too. Expanding and contracting. Spiraling.
Reid’s head began expanding, too. I heard his skull cracking. He pressed his palms against his temples and screamed.
For a second, I saw a glimpse of the lab with Reid bolted to the wall. But then I was back in the palace.
“I think he’s losing control,” I told Destiny.
The Reid with the crown placed his hand on Destiny’s head. Then he lowered her head and kissed her forehead. Kissed her cheek.
His head expanded again, and he screamed in agony.
We were back in the lab.
I ran toward Reid, bolted to the wall, and I began to beat his face. He laughed as blood poured from his mouth.
“You can’t hurt a God.”
Reid’s stomach kept expanding, pushing me backward, until I could no longer reach his face.
The basement filled with Christmas trees, covered with flickering red, green, blue, yellow lights.
“Mother,” Reid said. “Help me. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Destiny threw a metal canister at Reid’s head and then grabbed my arm. “We need to run.”
She pulled me back through the lab, the same way I’d come in.
In the previous room, Alexei was sobbing in the corner.
“You’d just leave me here, Vadym?” he asked.
I stopped and looked at him. I pitied him. I hated him, but I would never have wished him such a horrible fate. A long time ago, we’d been like brothers.
Could I save him? And even if I could carry him out of that building, what kind of life would he have now?
Destiny grabbed my arm again. “Come on!”
I followed her upstairs, back to the first floor, with its grey carpeting and tubes of fluorescent lights.
I tore the block of C-4 off my chest, snapped its wire, and threw it on the floor.
Destiny and I ran towards the front doors, but the room widened, stretching out for miles.
“He won’t let us leave,” I said.
“Just keep running.”
We kept running toward the doors. The walls contracted again and suddenly, the doors were right in front of us.
We shoved them open and ran outside into the parking lot. Anselmo was at the end of the parking lot, standing next to his truck.
I looked back at the Parallax Medical building. The entire building was deforming, growing and shrinking and twisting around itself.
Destiny and I kept running toward Anselmo.
Behind me, I heard Reid screaming.
“Do it!” I yelled. “Do it now!”
The explosion threw me to the ground.
“You’re alive?”
I blinked my eyes, disoriented and confused at first, but quickly remembering.
My skin felt scorched. My head throbbed with pain.
A giant angel stood over me, holding out his hand.
Yevun.
Why?
“Can you stand?”
I took his hand, and he helped me to my feet.
“Where are my friends?” I asked.
He pointed to the street. Anselmo and Destiny stood with three other angels.
“Where is Chazaqiel?” Yevun asked me.
“I’m not sure.”
“You saw him in that building, though?”
“Yes, in the basement. Kokabiel and Sariel were with him, too.”
More angels flew down from the sky. Azazel, Armaros, and two more I didn’t recognize.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“We came to stop him,” Yevun said. “I’m glad we aren’t too late.”
Reid screamed from inside the pit of fire, which was all that remained of the Parallax Medical building.
“That’s the human God they made?” Yevun asked me.
“One of them.”
“How many more?”
“At least one more.”
“Can we kill them?” Armaros asked.
“We can only bind them to the dirt.”
Armaros went to the fire and raised his arms. The ground folded over itself, burying the flames. Azazel repeated a chant and the dirt settled, becoming even and still.
The screaming stopped.
Yevun grabbed onto my chest and carried me into the sky. Then the other angels flew upward, too, two of them carrying Anselmo and Destiny.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked.
“Dollmaker City,” Yevun said.
I watched the ground pass by below me. The desert, then the forest, then the mountains, then the oceans, flying above it all.
What had become of Frank? I wondered. Had he been killed or only taught a lesson?
And where had Chazaqiel gone? Had he managed to save the enzyme? Was he creating new Gods right now?
I thought of the porcelain dolls that hung from tree branches. The four mutilated angels I’d seen drinking blood from copper spouts.
A return to the city of dolls. What was waiting for us there? Just more suffering, or finally the answers I’d been looking for?