I needed a good antacid. An invisibility cloak would also have been useful. And the bulletproof Popemobile that the Vatican has.
Bridget said, “We shot those two at the truck stop, prevented mass murder—but as far as we can tell, the incident doesn’t seem to have made much news.”
Panthea speared a crescent of cantaloupe from a platter and sliced it into bite-size pieces. “Media mostly do what authorities want them to do. In any case involving dead Nihilim, the authorities want to bury the story as much as possible, because they can’t explain the deceased.”
“You mean . . . what the autopsies show?”
“No. When the Nihilim die in this world, they die as Rishon like us. Only we, the alufimshel halakha, are able to see them for what they are. Autopsies won’t reveal monsters. The true nature of Creation always remains hidden.”
“Because the Nihilim aren’t of this world,” Sparky said, “they have no history here. No past. No identity.”
“Exactly,” Panthea confirmed. “Their fingerprints aren’t on file anywhere. They hold no jobs, have no families. They steal the money they need, or kill for what they want. They live under false names, manufactured identities. A dead man or woman like that, utterly untraceable, is a mystery to the authorities—one that’s plagued them for decades.”
Panthea paused to eat the cantaloupe.
Deciding that no more beef would be coming his way, Winston curled up on his chair and went to sleep.
Darkness had come beyond the window. Lightning and thunder still tormented the heavens, and rain still fell, so there would be no bug-and-bat show.
“In the nineteenth century,” Panthea continued, “even into the early twentieth, when there were no such things as drivers’ licenses and social security cards and medical insurance, a stranger found dead and unidentifiable was considered just a rootless vagabond of one kind or another. No one thought much of it. Now, when the government tracks everyone from birth and Google knows you better than you know yourself, a body that can’t be identified is deeply troubling to them. Especially when the cause of death was violence of one kind or another, and when the unidentifiable victims committed violence before they themselves were killed. Ironically, considering dear Hakeem’s obsession, the authorities have increasingly come to believe that the dead Nihilim may be extraterrestrials.”
In fact, they came from farther away than a distant galaxy. They came from another universe, from an Earth that came to an apocalyptic end before our Earth in this universe finished forming in the void. My brain wasn’t elastic enough to stretch around that concept. I was a guy who liked hamburgers with three cheeses and chocolate-covered doughnuts, who contentedly watched old Alien and Terminator movies over and over again, who was still a virgin and who had half expected to die as one at the age of eighty, until I met the moon goddess who told me that I’d marry her. I mean, expecting me to absorb and adapt to all this while having dinner was like expecting Bart Simpson to produce an exquisitely nuanced translation of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Bridget said, “How many of these creatures, these Nihilim, do squads like ours manage to exterminate?”
“I don’t know. They’re not easy to kill. You were lucky at the truck stop. I believe more of us die at their hands than the other way around.” Panthea regarded me in solemn silence and then said, “If we don’t get you gunned up, you’ll be the first of us to die.”
“Is that an opinion or something you’ve foreseen?” I asked, for it was of some concern to me.
“Without a pistol, you will be held down by two of the Nihilim. A third monster will slice off your tongue, pry your eyes out, cut open your chest with a circular saw, and eat your heart.”
“That’s convincingly specific,” I said. “I’m sorry I asked for clarification. I won’t do that again.”
“Eating your heart is a symbolic act, though they take almost as much pleasure in eating human flesh as in corrupting human souls. Primarily they feed on your pain, like a vampire feeds on blood.”
Maybe I was too sensitive, but having my heart eaten was more than a symbolic act to me. The Nihilim could buy a heart-shaped cake with my name on it and eat that, and I’d get the message. “So maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a member of a squad like this.”
Reaching across the sleeping dog curled between us, Bridget patted my shoulder. “You’ll be fine, sweetheart.”