I Can't Hang

Millions of them. Least, that’s what it looked like.

They were pouring out of that tornado formation up above into the streets. Clawing down from buildings, slithering below like snakes with legs, a ton of evil creatures made their way to the earth. With crimson leathery skin that wrinkled in all the wrong places and horns that poked out from their temples, these demons certainly didn’t look like no friendly guys, that’s for sure.

The sky had gone from lightly overcast a couple minutes ago to creepily dark and cloudy. It was like nighttime had spontaneously decided to show itself early that day, blocking out the sun and any sort of happy sunshine that could possibly shine on us. Thunder cracked. Lightning split the atmosphere in a brilliant shock of radiance.

Looked like one big mushy glob of wet newspaper up there. One evil glob of newspaper, I mean.

My throat went dry and I backed up instinctively, accidentally running into Brady, who was standing more confidently than I thought.

“God’s sending help,” James whimpered as if to remind us that our hopes weren’t completely lost.

When I glanced back at our hotel, all I saw was a heaping mass of bricks and drywall in a saddening cluster. The building was gone – along with all of our (well, Brady’s) possible plans of redeeming ourselves.

But the hotel wasn’t alone. No sir. Nope, in that massive bump of an earthquake, every other building on the street was taken out. Not even kidding about that. The little family-run businesses, the banks, the apartments…all gone. Crushed. Destroyed.

And if they weren’t gonna send angels to get rid of the demons, they’d have to send a ton to pick up all of the people who were in those buildings. That single thought sent a rocket of cold blood through my veins, racing in my system.

Taxi cabs were flipped over, capsized. Telephone poles were snapped in the middle, lying in the streets like sticks. Stoplights were destroyed and crumpled on the ground. And the roads? God. It’d take years to rebuild those – years and money that we didn’t have. This was the city where dreams were made. People came here to make a name for themselves. I never really realized that until then – when I saw it at its lowest, at its most depressing.

I felt like I’d just been punched in the gut and left to fend for myself with a broken rib. My vision got foggy again, just like when I was kicked out of Heaven. I could hardly stand up straight; I had to lean on either Brady or James (I couldn’t tell) in order to stay vertical. And all of those ramen noodles I ate tasted like they were gonna come back up.

Before I could puke, though, I felt myself get swept up in somebody’s arms and forced to run to a deep abyss that I didn’t recognize. I was stumbling even in my own head – I couldn’t register all of the images through my eyes. I remember little snippets of the sidewalk rushing past me, cracks forming from the hot magma bubbling below. But I don’t remember any sounds. Nobody was calling my name. Nobody recognized me. The only people on the streets were pedestrians and they were busy screaming from the onset of demons.

Once we stopped moving, I could make out darkness. At first it was scary and I recoiled, but my eyes adjusted. I wasn’t alone – Brady and James were there, and Brady was kneeled down in front of me, messing with my hair and flicking at my forehead and all that crap they do to wake you up. I was sitting down on the concrete.

“Kyle! Christ, kid, what the hell is wrong with you?” Brady groaned.

I blinked, realizing our surroundings as an alley. I saw James standing next to us, his wings out and about, looking shiny and new like he’d just died yesterday.

“What’s happening?” I heard myself say.

Brady gasped in content, flooding the air from his lungs with his eyes squinted shut. “Thank God, I thought you were dead or something.”

“They’re here,” James said, repeating himself from before.

I leaned forward and tried to stand up, but found no strength and ended up having to crawl out and look from under James’s wing. And sure enough…the demons had started making their way around the streets. They were clawing through asphalt, skinny legs and bony arms like nothing ever seen before on Earth maneuvering them.

Anybody who was on the sidewalks or in cars ditched what they had and made a run for the sidelines. Whoever wasn’t crushed by a capsizing vehicle did the smart thing and dashed away. But to where? All of the tall buildings were collapsed. They were caving in the roofs of the smaller ones. There was no escape – and hiding under the lips of asphalt that curled up was out of the question.

Panic set in again in my soul. I slowly backed away, rising to my feet with what little strength I had. My knees weren’t shaking anymore.

James looked around at the chaos surrounding him, seeming to keep a cool head despite his shaking hands that even I could see. He stepped forward, his shoulders cocked back. His wings were out fully now, reaching their biggest span and swaying in the threatening wind that was beginning to blow.

And he shouted, “Everybody, get inside! Get somewhere safe!”

I’d’a never imagined him able to yell so loud, too, you know? That’s something crazy about quiet people. When his voice rang out across the distance, people turned his way. And as if they didn’t believe demons were attacking their precious city, they gaped at him and his wings like he was some sort of rare spectacle. At that point, they still hadn’t gotten over the shock of Hell’s fury making their way through Manhattan. So angels? Pshaw. They were seein’ stuff.

They’d seen angels before. They just didn’t know it for sure. So when an angel was purposely revealing himself to innocent pedestrians, they sure as hell weren’t believing it.

Brady stood up next to James, in front of his left wing, and surveyed the area. Standing brave, tall. Meanwhile, I was cowering behind his other wing, shaking my head and trying to convince myself that this was all just a big fat nightmare and I was in a coma in the hospital bed, and my parents were sitting beside me, stroking my hair and telling me everything was alright…

But I opened my eyes after wrenching them shut, and the chaos surrounding me was still there.

“We have to fight,” Brady stated. “At least until the rest of the saints come in. It’s worth a shot.”

A fifty-pound weight fell on my chest and shoulders, restricting my breathing.

“We don’t got nothing to lose. Might as well try it. Maybe they’ll let us back in when they see us trying,” he smirked, shrugging. And man, the way his square jaw was clenched so tightly let us know that that smirk was forced.

James looked over at the scene, furrowing his brow. “How?”

Brady opened his mouth to answer, but stopped himself. None of us really knew how to take on a legion of demons. So this made us quiet.

“We could try anyway,” he shrugged to us. “Like I said – we don’t got nothing to lose.”

“Yeah you do.” James’s words were flat and steady, unlike Brady’s. “If you get hit by one of them and get knocked out, they can take you down to Hell. And once that happens, there isn’t any chance of you getting back into Heaven.”

“I…didn’t know that,” Brady stated honestly.

The younger man shifted his gaze out toward the city again. Things were only getting worse – an endless supply of demons were flowing out of that huge hurricane cloud in the sky. “We could try. I mean…Hell…that’s…that’s where we’re gonna go anyway, though…I guess I wasn’t really thinking about what had happened already.”

“We’ll go nobly if we do die, you know? So…” the elder one pointed out.

I just kinda stood there, leaning on one knee and trying to keep my head on straight through all of it. Mere weeks ago I’d have sworn all of this angels-and-demons crap was sheer bullcrap – manmade bedtime stories that gave hope to some and a reason to cause fights for others. And all of the people who followed it were too weak to find an anchor in their own lives. Nope, it was all about as real as a family portrait smile to me.

I could have still been in the hospital for all I knew. Maybe I was dreaming – one hell of a sick dream, I gotta say. Perhaps I was sitting in that hospital bed with an IV in my arm and a broken leg and scratches all up my body and a cut in my cheek or something. I probably hit my head, too. My hip would be shattered to bits. I probably couldn’t walk no more. I’d be a vegetable. Then I’d lose even more faith in ever possibly meeting God.

So what if I wasn’t dead after all? What if I hadn’t died, period? What if I took a couple seconds and paid attention and let that truck pass before I stepped out? What would Brady be doing? Would James even be found?

Would any of this crap even be going on? Jeez.

The asphalt in front of me must’ve been real interesting, ‘cause I was staring at it long and hard. I needed something static to look at while my head was havin’ a party. For a split second, I could’a sworn everything made sense in my entire existence.

I was the sole reason Manhattan, my hometown, was getting destroyed.

And when I realized it, I felt like puking.

Suddenly, that somethin’ overtook me. Brady and James were just standing there staring at me like I was staring at the street, gawking like I was some kinda rare spectacle of the world. Brady smacked my back and gripped me by the shoulder.

“We’re gonna go and fight,” he told me, smiling like his heart was about to break.

“Okay,” I gulped, trying to get back to reality.

But what took me off notice was when James swooped over and picked me up newlywed-style, flapping his wings to initiate a takeoff. I snapped out of my trance immediately and struggled out of his grip, and James let me down and stopped trying to fly me away.

“What the hell was that, Kyle? He’s takin’ you somewhere safe,” Brady explained, throwing his arm out behind us to point to the area of Manhattan that they hadn’t touched yet – the area furthest away from our hotel. “You ain’t stayin’ here while this is going on. You’re too young. You can’t get hurt.”

“And you guys can?” I countered, planting my feet firmly on the ground. “Why can’t I fight for my freakin’ city? If I wanna risk it, lemme risk it, jeez!”

They both froze.

“If we’re gonna go to Hell anyway – the three of us – we might as well put up a fight.”

James averted my eyes while Brady flipped his hair out of his eyes.

“If I let a kid become a demon,” Brady mumbled, “I’ll never let myself live it down.”

“Then live with it. We’ll all be livin’ with it if we don’t do something,” I grunted. “C’mon. Please?”

James bit his lip, but shrugged and looked up at Brady. The older one contorted his face up and reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, then stopped and simply said, “Whatever feels right, kid.”

For the first time in a while, I smiled and meant it. This felt like the rightest thing I’d ever done.