Page 9 of The Black Rider
I didn’t call Aeron and Leif for clarification, either. I stayed locked in my apartment, painting, and visiting with Miss Mabel. I went to my softball games and the tattoo shop, but that was it.
There was a method to my paintings. There was always this massive urge to get them all out, but I always knew when the series was about to end. I could feel it in my marrow that I was done.
I got home from the tattoo shop and turned my phone off. Leif was still calling, but I was ignoring him. I knew I had one painting left to do, and it would be a major one. I’d already built an enormous canvas before work. I had been itching to get home and put paint to canvas all day.
That was the night I painted the orgy in the oval office. When I came to and realizedthatwas what I’d painted, I didn’t have the same reaction as I did the second time I saw it. I immediately picked up the phone to call Leif and Aeron to tell them I was coming to Mexico.
Still, it had been years since I first painted that. The world had changed, and so did I. Iwas nothaving an orgy in the Oval Office.
Chapter 8
I
needed to find Leif and Aeron. I needed to apologize to Aeron because I remembered everything about how I reacted the first time I got just a little bit of information. I thought Aeron and Leif were just insane back then. But now? With everything going on and being around Aeron’s horse? I needed to be alone to process things years ago. I would have been petrified now. I would have run away from him, and there was plenty of nasty stuff out there that could have gotten their hands on me.
I found Aeron and Leif. They were sitting in front of a laptop with a gigantic bowl of salsa in front of them. I felt my stomach practically eating itself. I’d always been a big eater and going hungry on the road didn’t do me any wonders. I didn’t have to go hungry here, and Doctor Gonzalez permitted me to eat as much as I wanted. I wanted to go swimming in that massive bowl of salsa.
I plopped on the chair on the other side of the table and scooped up a ton of salsa on a homemade tortilla chip.
“What’s with the laptop? Didn’t the internet die with everything else?”
Leif just grinned at me.
“Dice got it back up and running before he left. He’s a crazy mother fucker, but he’s good with gadgets.”
“Which Horseman is he?”
“Dice is the Horseman of War and Asher is the Horseman of Conquest. Dice has been slowly gathering up an army. He’s training them in Florida. Asher is right under Isaiah’s nose watching the White House.”
“You said phase two. What’s that?”
“Promise not to hit me?” Aeron said.
“You have a bigger secret than being the Horseman of Death, and I’m the daughter of the Antichrist? I don’t think it can possibly get worse than my parentage.”
“Well, we’re angels, Ariel. We can fly, or we can just think it and appear somewhere. I could have grabbed you and just popped you to your apartment, but you would have lost your shit, and I was hoping to help you get some memories back on the road.”
I definitely would not have handled that well at all.
“I would have beat the shit out of you if I just magically appeared in my apartment.”
Aeron gave me this crooked grin.
“Yeah, I know, and getting a beating from Smurfette would be way worse than Mabel’s broom. I might be an angel, but I have a healthy respect for not taking a beating from angry Nephilim. There used to be a time where there were a lot more Nephilim on Earth, and they weren’t nearly as cool as you and Mabel.”
“So, you can magically appear and disappear. How does that play into phase two?”
“So, Dice recruited a lot of soldiers during the war. People who were active military at the time, not some backwater yahoo with a shed full of guns and an underground bunker who has been preparing for this their entire life. Remember that big virus when they couldn’t even stay inside a few months and started protesting so they could get a haircut? Yeah, most of them ended up leaving their bunkers because they got bored and got eaten. They are suitable for raiding supplies, though.
“Dice found hunters and people who know how to live off the land and defend themselves. Florida didn’t get hit that hard during the war. Some military bases ended up intact, and the planes undamaged.
“Dice and Asher have done this all over the world. There are trained air pilots and operational planes all over the globe, just waiting. Isaiah and the rest of the dictators think these soldiers died in the war, but they’ve really only converted to our side, and we are keeping them hidden.
“Phase two is me trying to figure out how to kill the Rage Heads with your blood. I’ll make it into an aerosol, and Dice will come pick it up. We will travel to Florida after that. We will distribute the aerosol around the globe, and the planes will release it into the atmosphere, killing all the Rage Heads.”
“Won’t they just shoot the planes down?”
It was an excellent plan, but it had holes. I knew air traffic used to be heavily monitored. I hadn’t seen a single plane in the sky this entire time, but someone would notice a fighter jet suddenly taking to the skies.
