A Kiss Before the Apocalypse

  “Casey,” she interrupted him. “Please call me Casey.”

  Remy sighed. “Fine, Casey.” He quickly went out into the hallway, hung the coat on the closet doorknob, and came back into the living room.

  “Casey, this type of thing is usually handled at my office,” he explained. “And even then . . .”

  “I've been to the police and they had me fill out all the proper paperwork, but I really don't think they took me all that seriously, and besides, he told me to come to you if anything happened to him.”

  Remy was surprised by the revelation. “You said his name is Jon Stall?”

  The pretty woman nodded. “Jon Philip Stall. He's a professor at Mass Tech. . . . Biology.”

  He repeated the name again. It didn't ring any bells. “I'm sorry, but I don't recall the name,” he said as he walked through the living room toward the kitchen. “Listen, I'm going to make a pot of coffee, would you like some?” he asked her.

  “I would love another cup of tea, if that would be all right,” she said, getting up from the couch and following, Marlowe close behind.

  “Apple?” the dog asked.

  “I'll get you an apple in a minute,” Remy told the dog as he filled the teakettle and placed it on the stove. He then started to prepare his coffee, deciding on a full pot. He suspected it was going to be one of those nights.

  “The week before he . . .” Casey paused. It was obvious that she was taking her boyfriend's disappearance quite hard. “The week before Jon went away, he talked about you a lot.”

  She was standing in the kitchen doorway, arms folded across her chest.

  “He talked about me?” Remy asked with surprise as he scooped freshly ground Dunkin' Donuts coffee into a filter.

  She nodded, pushing back a strand of dark hair that dangled in front of her pretty, oval face. “He talked about how much he admired you and what you had done with your life.”

  “I don't know what to say.” Remy shook his head, leaning against the counter as the coffeemaker began to hiss and gurgle. “I honestly don't know who your boyfriend is.”

  Marlowe barked once from his spot in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “Right, your apple,” Remy said, grabbing a Red Delicious from the fruit bowl and bringing it to the counter.

  “Did Jon say anything specific, Casey? Anything as to how he knew me or where he knew me from?”

  Remy finished cutting the apple into strips and brought them over to Marlowe's bowl. The dog bolted up from the floor, pushing Remy's hand out of the way to get at his treat.

  “He said you two had come from similar backgrounds – the same town I think.”

  And suddenly a recognizable image began to take shape in Remy's mind. Is it possible? he wondered. Had something ridiculously fortuitous dropped into his lap.... Or is there something else going on here?

  The tea water had started to boil, screeching to be noticed. Casey made a move toward it, but Remy was already on the way.

  “Sorry,” he said, taking the mug from her and placing a tea bag inside it. “Lost in thought there. So where was Jon from?” Remy asked, pouring the steaming water into the mug.

  “Some little town north of here called Paradise.”

  Remy's arm twitched and he spilled hot water all over the countertop.

  Paradise.

  He grabbed a dishcloth and started to mop up the spill. “Sorry about that,” he apologized, handing the steaming mug to Casey.

  “Is that where you're from, Mr. Chandler?” she asked him, watching him intently. “Are you from Paradise?”

  Images of a place that as far as he was concerned didn't exist anymore began to take shape inside Remy's head.

  It was so long ago.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Heaven, a very long time ago

  The sword in his hand grew heavier with each passing moment, the stench of burning flesh and blood almost palpable in the air.

  Remiel looked about the battlefield. What had once been golden fields of high grass that sang with joy when the celestial breezes moved through them were now trampled flat, and everywhere he looked his eyes fell upon the fallen.

  He knew them all, whether they be friend or foe, for not long ago they had been brothers under God. But that was before the Morningstar gathered his forces about him and challenged the will of the Almighty.

  Before the war that turned Choir against Choir, brother against brother.

  It was drawing to a close now, the followers of Lucifer Morningstar either vanquished or awaiting capture. But looking about the battlefield, at the twisted wings and broken bodies of those who had died fighting, Re-miel knew it would never be the same again.

  Standing there, in what had once been golden fields, he made up his mind, letting his weapon fall from his hand to lie uselessly upon the blood-soaked ground. Remiel closed his eyes, committing to his memory how it once had been.

  Slowly, he removed his armor, shedding the raiment of warfare, letting that too fall useless to the ground beneath his feet.

  “It is over, brother,” said a voice from nearby, and Remiel slowly turned to gaze upon the visage of the angel Israfil as he walked among the dead, their bodies disintegrating to dust, carried away upon the winds as he passed.

  As if they'd never been there at all.

  “The legions of the Adversary have been driven to their knees before His most holy glory,” Israfil told him.

  “And what of the Adversary – what of Lucifer Morn-ingstar, who was once the favorite of our Lord?” Remiel asked the angel.

  “He is to be cast down,” Israfil replied. “A fitting punishment for one who dared try to usurp the will of the All-Father.”

  At first Remiel did not respond, gazing out across the field and the bodies of those who had not yet been removed by the power of the Angel of Death, but he could keep it inside him no longer.

  “Haven't we all been punished enough?” he asked. And then he began to walk across the field-turned-battleground, on his way to the golden gateway that separated the Kingdom from all else.

  Remy knew that Jon Stall was Israfil.

  For some reason, he had chosen to don a human form and live among humanity. Now it was up to Remy, an angel who had done something very similar so long ago, to locate the wayward Angel of Death and convince him to return to the life that Remy himself never would.

  And, oh yeah, he couldn't breathe a word of it to his girlfriend.

  “When did you and Jon first meet?” Remy asked. They had returned to the living room, and he was sitting in a chair across from the couch where Casey sat, Marlowe practically in her lap.

  She took a careful sip from her mug of steaming tea before she answered his question, clearly reliving the past in her mind. “It was about a year ago. I was doing some temp work in the psychology department.” She made a face and then smiled. “Not the psychology department . . . the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.”

  Remy returned the smile. “There's a difference?”

  Casey laughed. “I guess so. He was just a nice guy, y'know?” She smiled warmly with the memory.

  Remy drank his coffee, his silence urging her to continue.

  “We really hit it off . . . both of us coming off some pretty rough times and stuff.” “Rough times?” Remy asked.

  She put her mug down on the table, doffed her shoes, and pulled her legs up beneath her. “I had lost my mother a little less than a month before to breast cancer, and Jon had been quite sick himself.”

  “I'm sorry about your mom.”

  “Thanks,” Casey responded with a sad smile. He could see emotion welling in her eyes.

  “Jon had been sick as well?” he prompted after a minute.

  The woman nodded. “From what he told me, I guess it was pretty bad. They'd given up on him. He had inoperable brain cancer and they'd given him less than a year to live.”

  Remy felt a cold knot of fear twist in his stomach.

  “So he survived, then.”
>
  “Yeah.” She nodded enthusiastically. “I guess they looked at him as a sort of miracle. The cancer went into remission and he was fine after that.”

  Casey picked nervously at a piece of skin on one of her fingers. Her voice started to tremble. “You wouldn't even know he used to be sick. It was amazing.”

  “Did he talk about his past much?”

  She was petting Marlowe's head as he snored by her side. “Not at all, really . . . other than the stuff about you. I know he doesn't have any family or anything – both his parents were deceased and he was an only child. He used to say that the cancer gave him a chance at a new beginning,” she explained. “That it enabled him to start all over again.”

  The icy knot in Remy's belly twisted tighter. Outside, the wind was whipping, spattering the heavy rain against the windows. Israfil had become this Jon Stall, assuming his identity, his life.

  But why? Why had he abandoned his work, and why had he then gone missing?

  “Tell me everything leading up to Jon's disappearance,” Remy said, gulping down the last of his drink. He rose from his chair, heading toward the kitchen for another cup.

  “More tea?” he asked her.

  “No, thanks. I'll be peeing all night if I do.”

  Marlowe lifted his head. “Treat?”

  “You've had enough,” Remy said, and the dog's large head dropped between his paws with a heavy sigh.

  “Was Jon acting strange? Was there anything to make you think that something might be wrong?” Remy asked, returning to the room with a fresh cup.

  He could see that she was thinking hard. “It's all hindsight now,” Casey said. “I really didn't think anything of it at the time – it was just Jon being Jon.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  She shrugged, changing her position so that now she was leaning against Marlowe. “He would get very quiet, then go into his study and lock the door and not come out for hours. Stuff like that.”

  “So you lived together?”

  “Yeah, he had a two-bedroom in Southie. I moved in not too long after we started dating. Most of the time it was great, just toward the end there it got a little hard. He was drinking a lot more and I think he might've been . . .” She paused.

  “Drugs?” Remy finished for her. “You think he might've been taking stuff?”

  “Yeah,” she sighed, the memories of the bad times weighing heavily on her. “He said that it was to help him sleep, but I don't think he was sleeping inside his study all that time.”

  “What do you think he was doing in there?”

  “I used to think it was school stuff, y'know, for the classes that he taught, but then I started hearing him talking to himself . . . and crying.”

  Marlowe lifted his head and looked at her with his deep brown eyes. He could sense that she was troubled, and laid his head consolingly upon her thigh.

  “He's so sweet.” Casey leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

  “Yeah, he's a good boy,” Remy confirmed.

  Marlowe's tail thumped on the couch.

  “Did you confront Jon about his behavior?” Remy asked, turning the conversation back to the problem at hand. He had to get every little bit of information he could to piece together the entire picture of the situation.

  “Oh, sure. And that was when he started talking about you, and how much he admired you and everything that you'd done in your life, and how I was to get in touch with you if anything happened to him.”

  Casey suddenly stopped talking, putting all her concentration into petting the dog.

  “Why do you think he thought something was going to happen to him? Did he give any indication that he was in trouble?”

  “Jon wasn't himself at that point, Mr. Chandler,” Casey explained. “He'd become very paranoid, certain that he was being watched and followed. He even stopped going to work, spending all his time locked in his study.”

  The warmth from the coffee cup felt good on Remy's hands. Even though he'd been out of the rain for well over an hour now, he could still feel the chill of the nasty weather.

  “And when did you suspect he was gone?”

  “Pretty much right away,” she answered. “He said he was going out for a while. He hadn't been out of the house... out of his study... for days. I just knew that something wasn't right.”

  Casey started to cry. Remy got up and brought a box of tissues over from a side table.

  “Thank you,” she said between sniffles. “It's just that he didn't even kiss me good-bye.” And then she began to cry all the harder. “I'm sorry,” she finally managed, plucking another tissue from the box beside her.

  “It's all right,” Remy said. “I can see how this would be hard for you.”

  She dabbed at her eyes and nose. “Was I right to come to you?” she asked, crumpling the tissue in her hand. “Will you help me, Mr. Chandler?”

  Marlowe lifted his head and woofed at him. “Yes.”

  “Marlowe says I should.” Remy rested his empty mug on the arm of his chair. “How can I argue with that?”

  She smiled sadly. “Thank you.”

  “Jon's things are still at the apartment, correct?” he asked.

  Casey nodded. “I haven't touched a thing.” “Good. I'd like to look at them. . . . If that's all right with you.”

  “Sure,” Casey said, nodding. “You can come over tomorrow and... “

  “Now,” Remy interrupted.

  The clock was ticking, and he couldn't afford to waste any more time.

  A handful of dog cookies and a promise to be back in time for Marlowe's breakfast, and they were off.

  The weather was still bad, alternating between torrential downpour and deluge, and Remy had to seriously wonder if this was some sort of precursor to the end.

  “You never really answered my question,” Casey said, above the sounds of the storm: the heavy patter of rain as it landed upon the roof of the car, the rhythmic swish from the wipers as they barely kept up with the water on the windshield.

  “What question was that?” Remy asked, as he headed down Atlantic Avenue toward Summer Street, the rain so heavy he could hardly see the harbor on the other side of the hotels.

  “What's Jon's connection to you?”

  He had to think a bit on how to answer. The truth was obviously out of the question, but he didn't want to lie to her either; the poor woman had already been through enough.

  “Jon has changed,” Remy began, carefully picking his words as he navigated the Toyota through the rain-drenched streets. “He isn't who I remember him to be....But then again, neither am I.”

  He could sense her sudden agitation.

  “So what're you saying: that you do know him, that the two of you have changed your identities or something?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Remy said, trying to stifle her growing unease. “Let's just say that we both have . . . complicated pasts, and leave it at that.”