I just stared and stared. I’d never imagined anything like this, and I’d seen a lot of weird stuff in my two weeks. As I watched, some of them flickered and lit up or dimmed down.
“What’s going on?” I asked Steve, forgetting for a moment that I was repulsed by him.
“They’re coming and going. Technically, we only have their souls here. Their bodies are still back in the dimension we live in ordinarily. When the bodies they inhabit sleep or are shut down, they come here. So long as the bodies are intact, that is. If the body is destroyed, the soul might get lost.”
“They’re dead?”
“They’re zombies.”
So, yeah. They were dead.
And I’m dead.
I didn’t say that to Steve. I guess I knew, really, before that moment, that I’d died. After all, I’d known I was different, and Samson had really pushed it into my mind that I was a zombie But I didn’t … know it, didn’t feel it inside me. It’s one thing to have something be part of your background awareness, and another entirely to have it suddenly consume your whole mind. As I stood there looking at the naked zombies I shuddered and looked again at my own body and I wanted to tear it off of me, throw it away. It wasn’t even my body.
It wasn’t even my body.
I felt tears starting up but Steve was staring at me and I decided I had to be a little stronger than that.
“Why do they come here?” I asked.
I meant why do they come to this cave, the souls, but I guess Steve didn’t know that because he said:
“Because we’ve blocked Heaven.”
I was startled and looked at him. “What?”
Steve turned to me, flappy gross eyelids lifting in surprise. “Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Why wouldn’t I be surprised when someone tells me that they’ve blocked Heaven?”
“You knew that, of course. Didn’t Samson tell you?” I shook my head. He looked at the two guys who were kind of guarding me. “Didn’t you figure it out from our name?”
“What name?”
“The Blockers,” Steve said. “Granted, it’s a dumb name, but we did not give it to ourselves; it’s what the third group started calling us. I suppose we needed a name, and we’d never given one to ourselves. So they started calling us ‘the blockers,’ and we took to it. Even had logos designed,” and he pointed to the little logo on his polo shirt, the gate with the bar over it.
I sat down.
“Why would you block Heaven?” I asked.
“We had to,” Steve said. “It was absolutely necessary to avoid Armageddon.”
There was a bit of commotion down the hall. I put my hands on my face and said “What does that mean, you blocked Heaven, anyway?”
Someone said “Stay here, please” but it was far away.
Steve was, when I looked up at him, looking at his Read-Or unit.
“Quit reading my mind,” I snapped at him.
“I can see you’re upset,” he said.
“You don’t need to look at my thoughts to see that.”
Steve was studying the Read-Or, though, and he looked up at me then and said “It wasn’t pleasant at all, I’m sure.” He mumbled it, almost to himself. He looked at the two guys. “What’s going on out there?”
“I’ll go see,” said one guy.
Steve looked back down at me. He bit his lip for a moment, and when he let up on it the lip stayed indented. Gross. “When Armageddon began, we realized it quickly. Not just me. I wasn’t even created then. But the people who originally ran the Blockers realized it. They had a Map room in our dimension and had noticed the increase in warfare, the rapid increase in warfare, across the dimensions, and were monitoring it. Heaven itself, as a dimension, is very hard to monitor. It’s in the center of all the dimensions, of course, and to watch it one has to get through a lot of other information, plus Heaven’s information is well protected by that wall God put around it.
“But they monitored it anyway. They were, I suppose, the government, almost, back then, although they didn’t have much power. But if you trace it down, we might be the remnants of the last real “government” the way people think of it. Not that it’s much to be missed. It’s not missed at all, in fact, since people think it still exists.
“A few people realized what was happening, though, or suspected, and so they began taking steps. They created revenants, like me, for one thing.”
Steve paused and looked off into space, staring blankly for a second. Almost, I felt almost sorry for him. But he was disgusting and he’d kidnapped me and he’d blocked off Heaven, or at least worked for people who did.
“They had to do that, because revenants, like other undead, can move more easily among the dimensions. Like you can. If you try. Otherwise, it takes a great deal of energy to do that. A great deal. Moving our things to Hell, for example, depleted about one-half of the entire power supply of the world for an entire week.”
“Sir,” one of the two guys interrupted. “I think we need you.”
“What is it?” Steve asked.
“He’s… trying to come down here.”
“What? How did he escape?”
“He wasn’t really tied up anymore.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m trying to talk here. Take him back and sedate him or something.”
The man looked back down the corridor and nodded. “Um. Okay. All right,” he said, and he walked back down. I could hear voices but I didn’t listen to them. I watched the lesbians flicker and listened to Steve.
“I may have to save the longer explanation for another time. Anyway, they began preparing to do something, the government did, our group did, suspecting that Armageddon was coming and then one day, they realized it was here. They looked in the Map and saw that the Gate of Heaven was open. The Gate opens, of course, only when God comes or goes. Angels use a side door. So they knew that God had come out of Heaven, and they knew they had to act.
“The Gate, you see, has to remain open. Heaven is the source of God’s power, in a way. He’s inextricably interlinked with that dimension. It was the first dimension, maybe the first he created or maybe both came into existence at the same time. Nobody knows. But we do know that God and Heaven are linked and that the Gate must remain open or God is cut off from His power.
“So when they saw the Gate open, they put their team to work. A group of revenants was sent to Heaven and told to close the Gate and block it off, and they did. That was before my time, too, but they recorded it and I’ve seen it. There was a brief battle, as the Angels tried to fight off the Revenants, but they were really no match for the Revenants because there weren’t many of them left in Heaven – too many were off setting up the other dimensions for the End of Times. And our group had the element of surprise. So we were able to close the Gate and block it off, trapping God out of Heaven and cutting off most of his power. And stopping Armageddon until we could figure out what to do next.”
There was more ruckus and I heard some yells including He said you’re not supposed to go there. I was trying to absorb what Steve had told me when I heard more running footsteps and someone trying to punch or hit someone and tackle someone and then a couple of guys came tumbling into our little ledge area. I recognized, to my surprise, two of them. One of them was the guy who’d gone up the hallway at Steve’s direction.
The other was Brigitte’s dad.
“You,” he said, and tried to push the guards off of him, but they piled on top of him and held him down.
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