The Heavens Rise

“Did you guys ever . . . You know, after I left . . .”

“No. Oh my God.”

“I don’t know. I just thought, maybe . . .”

“You thought he’d get wasted and I’d get desperate.”

“Not exactly that. But something like it.”

“I would never.”

“All right, fine.” She ran her fingers through his hair gently. “Has there ever been anyone?”

“You mean besides the guy you drove out of my apartment that night?”

“You’re welcome, by the way.”

“No. No one who . . . mattered. As much as you or him.”

Her touch was soothing and hypnotic.

“Ben . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know how they are when they’re . . . loose. What if he doesn’t come?”

“Then we look for him.”

Or someone else finds him first, and the entire world changes. She must have heard the exhaustion in his voice, because she slowed the gentle movement of her fingers through his hair, and for a while, they said nothing. It was long enough for the weight of sleep to sand away the edges of his thoughts.

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“I really thought you’d get a little bit taller.”

He laughed into her chest, and then she tightened her arm around his back, and after another few minutes or so, he slipped away. But it was the kind of fitful sleep he typically had after too many drinks, where the brief snippets of dreams seemed raw and close to the surface of wakefulness; he dreamed that he was awake and they were talking to each other when they really weren’t, and then the images from the aquarium played rapid-fire across his mind, each one too quick to startle him awake. But the high-speed-download quality of it left him with the awareness that he wasn’t slumbering so much as processing, and underneath this realization was the vague fear of who he would be once the impossible events he’d witnessed that night became a part of his memory.

Then Nikki was shaking him awake, and there was a noise outside like a low, crackling fire. “Ben,” she whispered fiercely. “He’s here.”

•   •   •

He could barely walk upright, not without the support of his wings pumping the air behind him, and the effort seemed to be exhausting him as he shambled across the empty parking lot. He switched to all fours but his forearms were ill designed for the task. In order to take a step, he had to flatten his five-nailed talons entirely against the asphalt, then take them up high into the air with each step, like a cat pulling its paws out of something sticky, all the while making sure the long curved nails didn’t fold together on each retraction, preventing him from taking another step.

Ben realized what was so awful about the creature; there was no evolution to its form, no logical physical adaptations to environment that had been refined over millennia. He remembered the photograph of the giant, deformed woman, whose giant tongue had been too big to fit inside her mouth. This creature had the same lunatic quality to it; its giant, protruding beak didn’t close entirely and the huge, ovular eyes—too full of human-shaped iris and pupil to look anything like those of a bird—didn’t blink because there were no eyelids to go with them.

If they left him like this, if they didn’t do something, he would not survive for long. Ben was sure of it. And the more he studied its imbalanced form, the more he realized why the creature seemed exhausted. Its massive wingspan made it more suited for flight, but the weight of its heavy, humanoid body must have created incredible drag. There was no way this creature could survive in the wild, if it wasn’t killed by a human. What choice would it have if it went on like this? Fly itself to death?

As he and Nikki crouched against the railing outside the wheelhouse watching its approach, Ben was grasping to figure out what memory of Anthem’s could have given rise to this thing. Then he remembered a drunken late-night phone call, right after Deepwater Horizon blew. They’re burning birds, Benny. In the oil. They’re caught in it but they don’t get them out before they light the fires to burn it off, and they’re all just going up. Are you going to write about it, Benny? You got to write about it, Benny.

The creature jumped down into the water with a great splash and began walking down the side of the boat, away from the wheelhouse, toward the yawning opening in back. The push boat’s weight shifted beneath them as the creature crawled inside the lower deck, and that’s when Nikki turned to Ben and looped several strands of red Mardi Gras beads around his neck. Then did the same to herself.

“I’ll get as close as I can,” she whispered. “You stand by, and when I’m ready . . . you drive him. But not until . . . not until . . .”

“Not until what?”

She bent forward and whispered words into his ear. They were short and sweet and simple enough to remember, but he was still sure he’d forget them in the terror of the moment, so he started whispering them to himself over and over again.

“I don’t know how much of him is still in there, Ben. I don’t know if—”

“He came here, Nikki,” Ben whispered. “Remember that. He came here.”

Nikki turned from him and started slowly down the exterior staircase that lead to the lower deck. He followed a safe distance behind. When they reached the lower deck, they found the creature slumped against one corner of the shadowy steel cavern, its feathered chest heaving. From the way it had jammed its wings up into the corner of the ceiling, holding them there by leaning his upper back against the wall, Ben could see what a terrible compulsion they made for the thing; a giant, undeniable invitation to take to the air, even though the rest of the thing’s body wasn’t properly crafted for flight.

Ben stood his ground outside the door to the lower deck.

Nikki entered the shadows. The creature didn’t seem to notice her approach, then, when she was eight feet from it, she said, “You know, you’re not going make a lot of friends around here with that T-shirt you got on.”

The avian head jerked back on its neck. The beak opened and closed, but no sound came from it.

“True,” Nikki continued, taking several slow steps toward the thing. “You did meet the two of us today, so I guess that’s something. But maybe after school, we can run you by Perlis and get you some of those polo shirts with the crawfish on them. You know, help you fit in a little bit more. What do you say to that, huh, Anthem Landry?”

The creature leapt forward, talons slapping to the metal floor inches from Nikki’s feet. Ben gripped the door frame, prepared himself to take the creature under his command, but when its beak opened, the sound that came ripping out of it had the tinge of a man’s wail in it. Nikki had held her ground and lifted one palm.

“After all,” she continued, but her voice was trembling. “You are the most beautiful man I have ever laid eyes on, so you can’t blame me for coming up with an excuse to get close, now, can you?”

The creature lifted one talon off the floor, and slowly extended one sharp, curving nail. “Nikki . . .” Ben said quietly.

Nikki shook her head, but she was having trouble keeping her eyes open, and her chest was heaving as the creature’s one nail traveled slowly up the length of her torso. To Ben, it looked like he was searching for a target, and he prayed it wasn’t Nikki’s beating heart or her carotid artery.

“You know . . . Mardi Gras is coming up soon, and we like to watch the parades from Third and St. Charles. It’s not too far from my house. Maybe you could join us, Anthem Landry. Would you like that? Would you like to watch the Ares parade with us?”

The nail found its target, the plastic medallion attached to the beads hanging from Nikki’s neck. A soft, gentle whine escaped from the winged beast. And Nikki said, “Would you like that . . . my hero, my God, my angel?”

Having heard the signal, Ben opened, and just as the scene before him turned silvery and luminescent, the creature’s soul sent him stumbling backward. He felt his ass hit the steel staircase, and then all sense of up and down, all sense of a bordered, orderly world was lost as he was battered by the nightmare-gnarled images pouring through him. The writhing body of the serpent Marshall Ferriot had become, Nikki shrinking from view as