Page 5 of The Devil You Know

I watched with detached interest as Michael tried to uselessly summon his heavenly powers. There was no denying it; we had been made human with all the pitfalls that entailed.

“I’m glad,” I started, and the angel’s frantic eyes snapped to mine, a question burning in them. “I’m glad he is dead.”

“Don’t... Don’t say that! How can you! He brought you to life!”

“And then he left me to burn,” I snarled. “Should I thank him on my knees for that? I owe him nothing. And now I’m finally free of him. I hate him, I hate him so much, Michael. You cannot fathom the depth of my hatred. I’m so relieved he died.”

That was too much for the Archangel. Maybe he finally realized I truly meant my words. Either way, he jumped to his feet, shaking his head as if the motion could save him from my words, and ran away. Well, at least he tried. I turned away with a derisive snort after he couldn’t make his new body work and faceplanted into the sand. I left him lying there and put distance between us. After all, it was highly unlikely we would work together. I didn’t want to work together. I was perfectly fine with caring only for my own survival.

The decades I spent on Earth during early middle ages, when I had a moment of admiration for how fucked up the crusades were and wanted to see the whole mess with my own eyes, resulted in me having at least some rudimentary survival skills. In the past I posed as a soldier, other times a simple merchant, or a peasant. Each of the personas made me learn skills I put to use now.

I took a moment to consider the order of importance of things I should do. Water. Food. Fire. Shelter. That seemed about right. I followed the path of vegetation and found a small lake which took care of drinkable water. I spotted a few fish in it as well, but decided to see if I could find or create a shallow dip near the sea line to catch fish that way first. Looking further, as luck would have it, I spotted a tree with what looked like apples. Apples! God really had a strange sense of humor. Especially as I was pretty sure I saw trees and plants that didn’t naturally belong in the same geographical area as apples. This only furthered my suspicion this island was an unholy amalgamation created just to trap me and Michael. And that meant no help was coming, not even from the humans with their boats or planes.

I snatched one perfectly red apple and bit into it out of spite. If it was poisoned, so be it.

Death didn’t come for me, so I sighed and continued my day. Before the sun set I managed to scout the area, gather some berries, start a small fire to test if I really could do it (I could, it just took a lot of practice), and created a small lean-to shelter. It wasn’t perfect, but there was something satisfying about working with my hands. A sense of accomplishment. The sleep came easily as my emotionally and physically exhausted body was eager to shut down.

Once the sun rose, I was woken up by the sounds of the island – chirping of birds, small creatures scuttling about, the wind playing in the trees. I wasn’t so much worried about my fragile human body, at least for now, so I decided to act as if this was a holiday trip. It was rare for me to be totally unreachable and I embraced not having to give a fuck. I couldn’t do anything about the explosive situation that had to be brewing between Hell and Heaven after God’s death, so I wasn’t going to let my mind fixate on it.

My long dark coat was left behind at my shelter – the heat from the sun too much to wear it today – as I made my way to the shore. It was time to see about those fishes. And maybe to find a coconut or two if I was lucky.

The first thing I found was Michael.

He was kneeling in the sand exactly where I left him, doing an impressive imitation of a puppet with its strings cut.

“God is coming back, you will see,” he said when he heard my footsteps, but his gaze remained fixed on the waves of the sea. “I just have to wait. He will be back. Or at least I will be back. God wouldn’t be so cruel as to take me from Heaven in such a crucial moment. They need me. He will be back—”

Ah. It seemed Michael reached the third stage of grief, bargaining. From the scratches on his hands I assumed he went through the second stage, anger, during the night; it looked as if he pounded the sand with his bare fists.

As semi-immortal beings demons and angels could usually afford long-winded approaches to the matters of the psyche, but Michael was a human now, and I feared that if I left him to process his grief at his own speed he would spend who knows how many nights just sitting here and die from something as stupid as thirst or infection.

“Wasn’t it you who told me God always has a plan? That his actions always do make sense, even if we can’t perceive it?” I asked, sitting next to the broken angel. “Then he had a reason to send us here.”

“A reason...” Michael’s eyes blinked slowly. “What... what reason?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “And I don’t care. I’m not going to look for it.”

With that, I stood up and patted the sand off. As I walked away, I felt the angel’s gaze following me, his eyes no longer trained in front of him. I hoped giving the angel’s mind that new motivation would be enough to keep him going. It was a bit cruel, as I didn’t really think there was any special reason God sent us here – or at least none besides this being his last joke, or a punishment, or him getting us out of the way – but if Michael getting up and doing something to survive depended on a lie that tied into his bargaining phase of dealing with grief I was fine with it. The alternative was speedrunning him into the acceptance phase with a shouting match and maybe a fistfight, so I was happy with my choice.

As I scavenged for coconuts, I observed from the corner of my eye that Michael finally got up. I frowned at the limp he had as he moved in the direction opposite to mine. Did he already hurt himself? Figures. Well, I did more than I should have. Now it was in the angel’s hands to survive.

The day quickly went by as I made a trap for fish, then prepared some rudimentary tool using hard shells, pieces of wood, and sharp stones. When the tide receded, I was happy to discover my genius shallow pool of water contained two small fish. Taking them out was a more complicated matter than catching them between the rocks. I cursed myself as, in the end, I went home with only one fish; the other somehow flopped back into the sea after it slipped from between my fingers.

Nevertheless, in the evening I had food roasting over a fire, a water source in easy reach, and a constantly improving shelter. This definitely wasn’t the lowest point of my life. In fact, I was starting to find the solitude and communion with nature pleasant.

That is until the storm came.

My rudimentary lean-to wasn’t advanced enough to truly protect me from the raging wind and a waterfall of rain pouring from the sky. And even if it was, the terrain around the lake turned out to be a horrible spot to be in while it was raining. The ground got muddy, and the water ran down towards my ‘home’. The situation was rapidly turning from extremely unpleasant to an immediate danger to my life.

I threw my jacket on and collected the few tools I had made, plus the remains of the fish, and moved towards the mountain in the middle of the island, hoping to get high enough to not get flooded.

There goes all my work, I thought as I looked back at the shelter I created slowly falling apart, definitely not pouting.

For a second I thought about checking on Michael, but I rationalized to myself that now, in the dark, with the treacherous, muddy ground and howling wind, I would be hard pressed to find him even if I knew where he set up camp.

That night was horrible. The storm lasted for hours and, even though I wore a jacket I had thought was waterproof, I got drenched anyway. In the end, I gave up searching for a proper place to rest and huddled up in a crevice in the mountainside that barely protected me from getting directly hit by the rain, but did nothing to prevent me from being cold, wet, and miserable. I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. When the clouds finally cleared, I crawled out of my hidey-hole and... what was that repeating sound in the distance? Theoretically, it could be some kind of monkey or even one of those birds that learned to smash clams on the rocks to open them, but my gut was telling me otherwise.

I creeped towards the noise and there, a few hundred yards from me, was Michael. He was sitting at the mouth of a cave and hitting a big rock with a smaller rock. No, wait, he was hitting something spread over the rock. I observed closely, and realized the angel was smashing some kind of vine into fibers, separating the strands to weave them together, if the small basket already at his side was anything to go by. Huh, so he had some useful skills, what a surprise. When I was still an angel, Michael was usually too busy to run around the Earth unless I dragged him there, so I imagined he didn’t have a lot of practice in observing humans and learning from them. Guess I was wrong. Or maybe someone in Heaven taught him the amazing art of basket weaving? Whatever the answer was, the angel had something I wanted more than his craft skills: a cave that looked deep enough to let me warm myself up if I made a fire there.

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