Columbus, OH - August 2067

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Passover

After leaving the ruins of the NNAA headquarters, Jude Sherman and his guardian angel Azazel decided to explore the empty and damaged city of Columbus. Jude drove his hatchback into center city and parked in front of the Franklin Park Conservatory. From there, the boy wandered aimlessly on foot for a few hours, the angel hovering unwaveringly beside him. By evening, Jude was growing tired. He queried the Universal Search Engine for “hotels in Columbus” and after ignoring and scrolling past several public service announcements and scarlet alerts about the evacuation orders, et cetera, the first result seemed enticing enough.

Jude made his way to the LeVeque Hotel Supercomplex, a sleek supertall tower built atop its namesake original structure (so the quick information tab on USE had said). The building was far from the part of the city significantly affected by Agatha, so Jude felt relatively unconcerned going inside and heading for an upper floor to search for a suitable place for a nap. He made his way to the impressive main bank of twelve glass elevators off of the mezzanine lobby, but as he reached for the recall button, one of Azazel’s triangular faces flashed with concern.

“It should be fine, we’re not too close to the damaged part of the city,” Jude protested.

Azazel flashed a thought-field saying, “Powerless.”

“Oh, fair point. Probably not reliable power around here right now. Guess I’ll be skipping the penthouse then.”

With that decided, Jude made his way to the nearby staircase and walked up as many floors as he felt like it wouldn’t be annoying to walk back down from (he ended up stopping on the twelfth). He and Azazel exited the stairwell and made their way to a corner suite. Upon reaching the door Jude presumed would have opened to the northeastern corner room, he realized his error. They should have raided the front desk for a room key. He figured he might as well check to see if any rooms were left open in the hasty evacuation before resigning himself to a trek down and then back up the stairs again. He walked down the first hundred-and-fifty-foot carpeted hallway without encountering a single open door, then turned down the second and had the same experience. Turning the second corner, he lucked out at last: a housekeeping cart was left propping open the door of the southwestern corner suite. He walked inside and flopped down face-first on the king size bed; Jude hadn’t realized just how tired the aimless wandering had made him, and he promptly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The next morning, Jude woke up, got a bottle of spring water from the minifridge, and sat in thought, staring out over the Columbus skyline and the wetlands beyond. He was thinking about the girl, Agatha Jones, trying to wrap his head around the concept of being dead and then being reborn. Reincarnation and resurrection were obviously history-long topics of intrigue and debate, but there had never been a concrete, proven instance of such a thing happening before now. Jude tried querying Azazel about it, but it was not enlightening:

“Do you know how this is all happening?” asked the boy.

A dimmer, bluer light flashed quickly downwards across the angel’s face: a dejected and resounding no.

Jude turned back to the window and continued his silent pondering. He hardly moved before the sun began to move downwards in the sky, but once it was parallel with him and irritating his eyes, he finally stood up and decided to find something to eat. Before leaving the room he checked the desk and found exactly what he had hoped to: the hotel’s amenities brochure. Being a supercomplex hotel, the LeVeque featured a variety of entertainment, recreation, relaxation, and dining facilities on several different levels. It seemed one of the building’s three five-star restaurants was located only two floors down, so Jude decided to head there and see if he couldn’t whip something up for himself.

Upon walking into the restaurant, a steakhouse themed around mid-twentieth-century highway Americana, Jude’s nose was hit with a distinct smell of rotting food. Looking around, he confirmed what he had immediately realized— with the rush of the evacuation, several diners’ dinners were left to fester in the open air for the past fifty-odd days. Crinkling his nose and pressing on to the kitchen, Jude found the cooks had had the forethought to realize anything they were amidst preparing would no longer be safe after even a short leave, as little food was left out on any of the counters and the trash receptacle by the door was stuffed to the brim with what appeared to have once been half-chopped vegetables. A few pans were left by the sink with half-cooked dishes having developed into colorful mold gardens inside them; Jude tossed these in one of the three dishwashing basins and set to task taking inventory of his usable ingredient options. After a few minutes of looking around, he realized such a high-quality restaurant didn’t have any substantial ingredients that would have kept for nearly two months.

“Damn,” Jude remarked, shaking his fist. “I really worked up an appetite for a good steak on the way down here.”

Nevertheless, Jude took this small blow in stride and left the restaurant. He recalled that there was a budget-friendly buffet hall on the same level, and suspected they’d at least have some frozen things he could make work. Unfortunately, the issue of rotting food was far more prominent there, the stench of three decaying buffet lines and two dozen or more abandoned plates emanating several yards down the corridor as Jude was on the approach to the buffet hall. He physically pinched his nose as he made his way through the spacious eatery and into the kitchen. The more industrial scale of this kitchen meant the cooks had not been able to be as anticipatory of their own return as the cooks at the steak place, and rot permeated the kitchen as well. Jude hurried to the walk-in freezer at the back, still pinching his nose. Inside, he shivered in his shorts and tee as he looked around quickly for something resembling a self-contained meal, quickly settling for what appeared to be a lasagna.

Armed with his frozen tray, Jude decided to beeline back out of the stinking buffet place and head back to the other restaurant’s less potent kitchen to cook. To his dismay, the probable lasagna did not have any sort of instructions on its aluminum tray or plastic overwrap. His best guess was to take the overwrap off and give it an hour at 350 degrees and then go from there. Thankfully the industrial natural gas oven preheated quickly and he was able to pop the tray in after only a few minutes, because the stench of the trash and the pans in the sink was starting to make him seriously nauseous.

While he waited out his hour before checking on the food, Jude wandered through the entertainment amenities on the floor above. The whole floor was open out to the exterior walls on two sides, only obstructed on the sides made up by wings of the original building, and then while the room stayed quite expansive for multiple stories of height, it did close in on the new sides to accommodate the other wings of rooms and suites. Many rooms on the twelfth through sixteenth floors had balconies overlooking this faux courtyard of sorts. Jude looked up at the ceiling five stories above him and took a moment to appreciate the ingenuity of the false sky on the underside of the seventeenth floor, which was accurately simulating the time of day but giving a light-pollution-free version of the sky, leaving the Milky Way visible even in the twilight sky.

The main attraction of course was not the ceiling but what was underneath it: an approximately 230,000 square foot amusement park, complete with two roller coasters and a variety of thrill rides, and in between each of them were a variety of amusements. Jude didn’t dare trying to run one of the rides for himself, so he instead meandered between them and tried his hand at a number of the simulated carnival games. After he had settled in front of a ski-ball machine, playing a half dozen rounds or more, the alarm he had set on his phone for the lasagna finally went off. He made his way back to the steakhouse kitchen, where he was glad to discover the smells of garlic and Italian spices were now masking those of the garbage and the sink.

Jude opened the oven door, and using a towel to protect his hand, he slid the rack with his food on it out a bit. Using a fork, he poked at the middle of the cheese-and-sauce surface of the tray, at which point he realized he was not cooking a lasagna but a tray of cheese tortellini. This was actually a turn for the better, as Jude much preferred the latter dish. The moment then turned bittersweet, as his mind turned to his parents when he thought about how cheese tortellini was his mother’s favorite dish. He’d managed to avoid worrying about them for a while now, but as he removed his tortellini from the oven, Jude’s eyes welled with tears. He slumped to the floor, suddenly overcome with the weight of his emotions, and sobbed until his tortellini was room temperature. Azazel hovered patiently beside him, and tried to comfort him with a thought-field:

“Hope.”

“Oh, but they’re dead, Az, I just know it!” cried the boy.

After that, Jude’s tears subsided, and he solemnly ate a small portion of the cold tortellini. He brought the remainder of the tray with him back to the room he was occupying, popped it in the minifridge, and laid down in bed for another deep and dreamless sleep.

Jude slept for a full two days, the fatigue of his long journey having caught up with him at last.

When he awoke on his fifth day in Columbus, it was already getting on toward noon. He groggily microwaved his leftover tortellini and ate a few bites before his appetite escaped him. He had some cold brew that had been a component of the room’s pre-stocked minibar and turned his thoughts toward next steps. There wasn’t much point to aimlessly hanging around the city anymore, much less the LeVeque, so Jude figured he should do something more purposeful or else head out of the city altogether. He decided he’d go check the Metropolitan Library archives for any old articles or anything at all about Agatha’s death to see if he could find any clues as to where she may go next.

After making his way back down all the stairs to the ground level, Jude stepped outside into the muggy heat of the early August day and together he and Azazel walked the dozen or so blocks to the library. When they arrived, Jude was thankful for the shade and relative cool of the building, despite how stale the air seemed inside after only a brief period of inoccupancy. He looked around the lobby for a map of the sizable institution, and after spotting an information kiosk at the far end of the large room, he discerned the location of the archival stacks. He paused for a drink at a water fountain, and refreshing himself seemed to refresh Azazel as well, the small node brightened up ever so slightly and hovered a little higher again.

Having then made his way down to the archives, Jude was surprised by Azazel flashing him a thought-field:

“Presence.”

Freezing in place immediately at this, Jude listened intently for signs of life in the cavernous stacks. After a moment, he could hear someone opening and closing file drawers seemingly just a few aisles away. Jude decided to cautiously approach the mystery individual, slowly moving over one aisle at a time. When he could finally see the person through the empty spaces in the next stack, and could tell it was someone probably about his age who seemed to simply be reshelving items, he decided it was probably better not to spook them and called out as he came around into their aisle.

“Hello there! Do -” he had intended to ask if the person worked at the library but was cut short by them screaming.

“JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK-” they caught themself as they realized Jude was probably not a threat, “Oh, sorry,” and then they had to pause to catch their breath, “sorry. I’m Sara, apparently the librarian here now. Do you need library help? Nobody’s really been in here what with…” she gestured vaguely at everything.

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“Hi, my name’s Jude, and yes actually as insane as it is, I do need library help. Any chance you could help me locate information about Agatha Jones?”

Sara actually laughed aloud at this, which elicited a quizzical look from Jude.

“I think your average librarian would laugh at you for asking about some random girl with no context; by some miracle for you though I am not your average librarian. What do you need to know about ol’ Aggie?”

“I don’t really know I guess, anything? Everything? Why do you know about her, anyway?”

“Well, that really narrows it down for me. And why do you want to know about her? It’s probably the same reason I do know about her.”

“You’re hunting her down to kill her with the help of your guardian angel?”

Sara took pause at this.

“Wait. You’re doing what with who?”

“Azazel here and I are gonna kill her,” Jude gestured to Azazel, who now hovered around from behind him into Sara’s view.

Sara took a second to look back and forth between Jude and Azazel a couple of times before speaking again.

“Okay well, for the record, I know a lot about Agatha because she was semi-secretly the main focus of American nodal research for the past decade or so, and is presumably now out there wielding the powers of a god to wreak havoc on the globe, so my assumption about your motive was definitely wrong. Anyway, as far as information useful to you— well, just come with me.”

Jude and Azazel followed Sara as she wormed her way through the archival stacks to a door back by the stairs they had originally come down. She tapped a keycard to a pad next to the door, unlocking it, and the trio went through it into a small office. There was a tall combination bookshelf and filing cabinet on the wall opposite the door, a built-in desk holding two computers on the far wall, and a bulletin board on the wall beside the door. Sara presented the bulletin board with a flourish of her arm.

“Here is the web of lies and secrets which surrounds the entity allegedly once known as Agatha Jones,” she paused, then continued as Jude began to take in the mass of inter-pinned articles, photos, excerpts from scientific reports, and other hard-copy information covering the bulletin board and spreading off of it onto the surrounding walls, “that’s what I’ve been calling her anyway, in case it turns out it’s not her at all.”

Jude didn’t respond, as he was too engrossed in trying to draw some meaning from the web wall, but Azazel flashed one of his faces. Sara almost thought the little node was laughing.

“Hey, so what’s the deal with the node?”

“His name’s Azazel,” Jude did respond to the direct query at least.

“Right, you said that.”

“Yeah, anyway he’s my guardian angel. I don’t know how or why, but my parents both had— have— whatever, they’d their own guardian angels before me, and then Azazel’s been with me since the moment I was born.”

“This is poking so many holes in everything I thought I knew about life but I’m just gonna pretend it’s not. What does being a guardian entail exactly?”

“He and I can communicate, which I guess isn’t really guarding anything, although sometimes he’ll give me warnings about things, like if something is coming around a corner or if I’m gonna make a bad choice somewhere. I think partly we call them guardian angels to make it comforting instead of scary that these weird alien lights we know nothing about are following us everywhere and inside our minds,” explained Jude, as the little blue node in question hovered motionlessly between them.

“Ah,” was all the reply Sara could muster, her mind still clearly reeling from one world-shattering revelation after another.

Jude watched as Sara literally shook it off as she refocused her mind on the matter at hand. She picked up a pointing stick from the ledge beneath the bulletin board and extended it militaristically, then immediately began tapping at items on the wall as she talked Jude through the whole web at breakneck speed.

“So, Agatha Jones. Born July seventh, 2007, in central Ohio, she had a completely average and normal life up through age seventeen, when she was working as a ‘QuestMaster’ at a laser tag facility in the town of Gary. While working there, just a week after she received a small promotion, she was spontaneously combusted in an incident that caused half the shopping plaza to burn down in under an hour. The going theory is that she came into contact with some kind of proto-node containing an immense amount of stored energy which caused her and the proto-node to explode and fuse and create the nodes. According to the ‘Ramiel Journal’ which you’ve probably heard of, and if not, I’m not gonna waste the time explaining it now, anyway according to the Journal, Agatha was still alive as this happened, and her consciousness was imbued into the nodes. Nothing of importance to us right now happened for the next forty years so we skip ahead to…” she dragged the tip of her pointer diagonally across the wall, knocking a few post-its and smaller scraps of paper loose as she went. “…what I refer to as the Agatha experiments. Starting possibly as early as 2055, the National Nodal Array Administration began to conduct experiments surrounding various points mentioned in the Ramiel Journal, largely at the behest of the Internal Defense Agency. Among these experiments were attempts to decipher the Superior Array Sequence, attempts to discern the true nature or origin of the Nodal Dust, and similar such hypotheses. By 2065, they were convinced that Agatha Jones somehow created or became the nodal dust, and they began experiments with the intent of reconstituting her physical form from the dust. These experiments were likely responsible for the First and Second Material Raptures and subsequent Eucharist events,” here, Sara paused again. “You following all this?”

Jude’s mouth was hanging agape a bit, but he nodded and gave a “mmhm” nonetheless.

Azazel, meanwhile, flashed a light that seemed to Sara a knowing confirmation.

“Okay, so, bringing us to the incident that brought us to the current situation — no nodes, rampaging girl with the powers of God— in 2067 the NNAA and IDA began conducting their final experiment toward the reconstitution hypothesis, in which they planned to use a nuclear fusion-based transfer process to fuse multiple nodes together and reconstitute a portion or pale facsimile of Agatha Jones. It’s unclear whether they were responsible for her complete reconstitution due to unforeseen critical success of their experiment, or if she or the nodes were somehow responsible in some way. Either way, she’s been rampaging around the world now, and news reporting has been scarce due to the sheer scale of the calamities everywhere but so far it seems the most egregious acts have been converting populated areas directly into old growth forests, completely transforming the matter of anything — and anyone— within, and some time after that, more recently, she seems to have conducted a straight-up rapture.”

“Ah great, matter conversion and ‘straight-up rapture’, should be a cinch to kill her then,” Jude said, joking, but not by his tone.

Sara shuddered at this. Perhaps she didn’t like the concept of murder, or perhaps she was thinking of what might happen to this teenage boy as he went to face off against a divine entity.

“Well, thanks for the help, I suppose I’ll go think about how to get to Agatha and see if I can train ol’ Az here to convert matter or something,” Jude said.

“Wha— that’s it? You’re just going out there again, just like that?” Sara seemed unsure of Jude, but also didn’t seem like she was going to stop him leaving.

“Yeah… I don’t know, there’s not much else I really can do, is there?”

“I don’t fuckin know dude this is crazy shit you’re dealing with, and I’m just a librarian at the end of the day. Why don’t you at least join me for dinner and rest up tonight, start your quest to kill god tomorrow? We can do some research on node experiments that might help you figure out how to tap into Azazel’s power…” Sara trailed off; for some reason she was feeling compelled to do more to help Jude, but the whole thing was, as she had said, crazy shit.

“Yeah, wait, you are just a librarian. Why are you still here after the whole city’s been evacuated for two months?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t really have anywhere to go if I left the city, so I figured I’d be just as well off staying, at least as long as I had food and such. Then to occupy myself I decided I’d spend the days reshelving every unsorted item in the stacks. And… well, the Ramiel Journal describes something major happening at the site of Agatha’s return after she burns the world for sixty days, so I kind of figured I’d try to at least stick it out till then and see if I get a front row seat.”

Jude nodded solemnly. It wasn’t any less reasonable than how he’d occupied the last fifty-some days, just traveling alone past all the horrors.

“You’re not like, afraid it’ll be another catastrophe or something that might… kill you?” Jude posited.

“Honestly, death is one of the least scary things left in this Hell we call Earth.”

Jude couldn’t refute that, so he simply nodded again. Even Azazel seemed in agreement, dimly flashing one of his faces a dull blue. After a moment of silence, Jude’s stomach grumbled audibly.

“So… about that dinner offer?”

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Sara led Jude out of the library and a block or so away to a bodega.

“This was my favorite place to grab lunch, before everything went to shit. I knew the owner had a solar-charged battery backup for power because he had told me as much when I came for lunch during a massive storm once. When everyone evacuated and they shut down the grid, I had already made up my mind about staying so the first thing I did was come over here and turn on the backup power so I’d have a source of unspoiled food. To that end, would you prefer a sub or an egg and cheese? Or there’s a handful of frozen dinner choices left over there,” she indicated a freezer in the back of the small store.

Jude went to look at the freezer. There was a frozen tortellini right on top, and he immediately moved on to browse drink options in the line of refrigerators next to the freezer. As he perused, he called back to Sara, who was now behind the deli counter at the front of the store, “a sub sounds good. Can you do an italian?”

“Yeah, I’ve got all the right meats and cheeses still good, all the tomatoes have gone bad though. Can do lettuce, onion, and any peppers if you want,” Sara called back as she started getting out various sandwich ingredients.

“Lettuce would be good, and I think I could go for some hot peppers on there, thanks.”

While Sara prepared Jude’s sub and then one for herself, Jude made his drink selection (a violet-flavored energy beverage) and then browsed the aisles of snacks to find something of a side dish. He finally looped back to the counter just as Sara was slicing their subs into halves, and as she pushed his across to him on a brown paper plate, Jude dropped his snack selections between them.

“Thank you,” Jude said, before hungrily starting in on the first half of his sandwich.

The two ate in relative silence, occasionally throwing in a fistful of cheese-dusted pretzels or barbeque corn snacks between mouthfuls of sub. Sara finally spoke again as Jude was shaking the crumbs from the pretzels directly out of the bag into his mouth.

“So, I’ve got a handful of experiments in mind that might be relevant, I’m thinking we can go back and pull up those files from the Transparency Act archive and see if any of the details are useful.”

Jude nodded in agreement, and in doing so managed to get some cheese dust in his eye. Sara had a good laugh at his expense as he exclaimed in discomfort and rubbed his eyes and blinked excessively until they were clear again.

After Jude recovered, he, Azazel, and Sara made their way back to the library and set about their studies. Sara took out a dozen or so files and the two each took a few to pore over on opposite sides of a large table in a wide aisle between two sections of the stacks. Until late into the night they stayed there, reading aloud any sections of the scientific write-ups that sounded like they might be helpful to Jude in his effort to “train” Azazel.

By the time they were both nodding off in their seats, Jude didn’t really feel like he had any better chances than when they started, but the fact that someone had made such an effort to help him at least boosted his confidence that he was attempting the right thing.

After Jude finished reading a particularly jargon-filled paragraph aloud, more because he was amused by the absurdity of the language than because he thought it was particularly useful, and it elicited no response from Sara at all, he realized she had finally fallen fully asleep. He called her name a little louder than he had been speaking previously, and she sat up with a start.

“You dozed off there. Let’s call it a night, huh? Thanks for everything today.”

“Yeah, I’m beat. And no problem, it’s been nice to have company for the first time in a while. I’ve been sleeping on a couch in one of the lounges upstairs most nights, if you feel like crashing here with me tonight?”

“I think I will take you up on that, I don’t think I’m up for another night in the LeVeque.”

With that, the two made their way to the aforementioned lounge, and settled down for a long night’s sleep.

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It was mid-morning when Jude and Sara awoke again, and the two went back to the bodega around the corner where Sara prepared a mean egg and cheese for each of them. After they ate, Jude announced his departure.

“Thank you so much again, for everything. I think it’s best to put some distance between us and anyone else when me and Az start training, so we’re gonna head off toward a different part of the city now.”

“Yeah, that’s probably wise. And like I said last night, I’ve been more than happy to help,” Sara replied with a smile.

“We should meet again when this is all over,” Jude suggested.

“Depends what you’re referring to with ‘this;’ I’d like to hang out again after Agatha’s gone, but I don’t think we’ll ever know a world without the nodes and the calamities they keep bringing us,” Sara said, with hope and despair in seemingly equal measures.

Jude only nodded somberly, offered Sara a hug, which she accepted silently, and then he headed off past the overgrown topiary park, back towards the Franklin conservatory where he had left his car when he and Azazel first arrived in the city. He figured the open air of the large park would be as good a place as any to try to transcend everything he knew about his little blue companion.

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