[Warning: Language]
"Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood."
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy
***
"London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
London bridge is falling down, my fair lady."
There's something about bridges that always intrigued John. These giant, steel hulls were the links between landmasses. Until the bridge came along, a river was an issue, a lake was a problem and an island was unreachable. These connections between chunks of earth were defiant as well. They stood against time in spite of themselves. A bridge, rusted and dying, still manages to provide that connection.
Somewhere in his life's journey, John Salvador got lost.
The fighting, the pains that he always went through, the running, the dark alleyways. it all seemed so pointless to him now. His life, if it may even be called that, had degenerated into a tired routine. Fight, get hurt, fight, kill, save the innocent, recuperate, fight, get hurt, fight, kill, save the innocent; again and again until the battle all felt the same, the pain felt unreal, the enemy a mere shadow and the innocent were not so innocent anymore.
John felt old. He was tired and wanted to just give up this life and lay down and die. It took him 96 years but, time had finally begun to take its toll. His curse however held that thought back. He would never give up, he'd never commit suicide and he couldn't take foolhardy chances. While he was tired of the fighting, his enemies weren't. Some of them were younger, some were older than even him. But, they all felt that their status as an Angel, for lack of a better word, meant that they were born to rule here on earth.
John never bought into this philosophy.
First of all, he doesn't want to rule anything. He just wants to be able to sit around, read and do some fishing every now and then. Secondly, those Angels that want to rule, actually want to enslave humanity. They see them as second-class beings, beings so much lower than themselves that they are worthless. It seems that these Angels that see things this way seem to forget that they too, came from humanity.
John doesn't want this to happen. He remembers the cold feeling of his humanity slipping away, all too well. He isn't like the others, he wishes to cling to the fleeting bits of humanity that the other Angels, his enemies, wish to detach themselves from. So, he fights them. He fights them in back alleys, in dark, desolate streets, in places where no one may know about the battle going on for their lives.
There are several things that assist John in his battles though. For one thing, John is immortal; all Angels are. The only things that can end his existence are his eyes, they must both be destroyed before he can be killed like a mortal. He also heals very quickly. This means that the bullet holes, the knifings, the huge gashes that result from being the loser in a swordfight heal mere minutes after they occur. The worse the damages, the slower the healing.
This doesn't mean that John feels no pain, no, no. That would make things much too easy on him. No, John feels pain as any normal mortal would, sure, his tolerance for such pain is much higher than most normal human beings but, he still feels pain. He's known the searing heat of a bullet wound all too many times. He's been through more than most even understand and yet he's still in those back alleys, fighting.
But now, Standing on this bridge, John mused over all of his hardship's worth. It occurred to him that he made no real huge difference in the world. Then he thought of those who he drafted into the war. To them, John was a savior, a friend and quite an asshole. Suddenly, the sun poked out of the storm clouds and John decided to leave this train of thought alone for now. There would be other time to mull over this. Now, he needs to go to work.
John pulls a cellular phone from his pocket, stares at it for a while and presses a sequence of buttons that sends a specific packet to the cellular phone company. The cell phone company then sends a couple packets that make their way onto the big phone company backbones. These little electrical impulses travel through a complex set of switches to a phone.
The person on the other end of that phone waits exactly five seconds before lifting the receiver. The person is female. She stands just under five foot, seven inches tall. She puts the phone to her face and swallows.
"Rose's palace of infinite knowledge, your quarter." Rose says. It's her customary greeting, she did it a couple times as a joke but then found that she didn't really want to stop saying it. It was original, it was something no one else would do. It was a Rose thing to do.
"Hey Rose, it's John. Got anything new for me?"
"Yeah, it's a doosy."
"Hmm. Not even gonna do your bad news, good news bit?"
"Nope. No good news to tell ya about."
"Shit." he sighed, "Okay, lay it on me."
"Well. it's like this.." She began.
II
"...During Those Days, Men will seek death,
but will not find it; they will long to die but
death will elude them."
From the book of Revelations
***
"There is a place where everything meets...." She said.
Those words began what can only be seen by John as his first brush with infinity.
He prepared himself for the worst possible threat. He had himself mentally prepared to go to hell and back. He imagined things from movies that he'd seen. He imagined things from books that he'd read. For all his preparation, for all he imagined, he wasn't even close to prepared for this.
"...to the place behind mirrors with their great magic."
With all that he'd seen, all that he'd known, there were things he just never believed. He still clung to a world where magic is a thing from fairy tales, where mirrors reflected light. He clung to a world where everything was explainable in some way or another.
"...now, the mirrors are reactivating, the magic is being undone."
The words that came out of her mouth brought up doubt. It caused conflict. Secretly, John believed that his status as an Angel was some sort of genetic mutation. Something, anything that would make sense of everything he'd seen. Those words, destroyed it all. They'd broken his imagined world into pieces. Each piece a twisted funhouse mirror of reality. Each shard a splinter of infinity. Each part a reflection of God.
"...You have to get the mirrors before the portals open."
God. Satan. These were things that he never came into contact with. Angels were a source of power behind the faith of mortals. This Angel never believed. He never embraced what he was given. He saw it as a curse, he saw it as an affliction, he believed himself to be a mutation. He had never been more wrong.
"...by midnight tonight."
John didn't even hear the rest. His world exploded and became ash then, the ash became vapor and the vapor became nothing. He was suddenly alone in a world much stranger, much darker than he'd ever believed it to be. In one phone call, his world had been brutally taken apart and refitted together in cruel, obscure ways. Nothing made sense to him anymore, nothing had direction.
The phone fell from his limp hand, it tumbled down through the air. John simply looked up, to the sky expectantly. 'God... God must be real. I must be... oh my...' his thoughts came from him as jagged shards. His mind couldn't comprehend any of it. 'All this time... all this time I...'.
Tears fell, each reflecting a view of infinity.
"...hello? Hello? John? You there? Hey!"
The phone struck the water.
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