Chapter 8 - Wanna Be Like
Mike
For the second time
that night, Rydell found himself in a coffee shop. Mr. Coffee said he made a
special blend to keep the angels away for a while. Nobody seemed to take much
notice of the two office workers, the mechanic, and the gang-banger. Babel
tried his best to slow down enough so everyone could understand.
“They showed up on the
other side of town, over in one of the upscale neighborhoods. They’re a whole
seven days early.”
Wrench held her face
in her hands. “That means Old Mike is getting involved directly.”
Rydell blinked. “You
mean Archangel Michael, right?”
Mr. Coffee put down
his mug and nodded. “This is very bad for us. When Mike sends in a group of
insane angels, it shows that he doesn’t care if things get torn up. When his
insane angels come back in only two days after we kill them, we’re only one
step away from Mike himself coming down here and kicking our asses.”
“So what’s the
signifigance of two days or seven days or whatever?”
“When a celestial dies
on Earth, we get sent back to Heaven or Hell to put ourselves back together.
Usually, it takes about nine days, and longer for the more powerful angels and
demons. But that’s where the angels have an advantage. If their archangels decide
that it’s important for an angel to get back to Earth, they can speed up the
healing time. Usually, it’s only by one or two days, but when it only takes two
days for a dead angel to come back, we have a very large problem.”
“What about the gun?
Can it stop an archangel?”
Wrench shook her head.
“Only if you could hit one in the head, and to do that you’d have to get close
enough. The archangels have some holy force field around them, and you’d have
to be crazy to try to get inside of it. Mike is the Archangel of War, remember?
Fighting him is like standing in front of a bullet train. The result is about
the same, too.”
Rydell shuddered. “Lovely. Absolutely lovely.”
