u/Open_Pizza_8060

I was nine when I started seeing them. My mother was driving me home from school, and I slumped against the window in the backseat. The day had been normal, so normal in fact that I can’t recall anything specific preceding that moment. Mom was flipping through channels on the radio, indecisive as always, and everything was still. There was no sway in the trees, and there weren’t many people to speak of out on the streets.

I closed my eyes, lulled by the steady ebb and flow to Mom’s radio expedition. Then came the break. A roar came from above, reverberating through the air and shaking the Earth to the bedrock. I had never heard anything like it. There is no sound in space, but I imagine that is what the birth of the universe sounded like. Awesome and terrifying all at once.

I jolted in my seat and turned my eyes toward the sky. The day was clear, no clouds to speak of. And there, just below the Sun, a jagged crack had formed in the blue. Gold seeped out at the edges and spilled down upon the city.

It was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen before or since. At the time, I didn’t know it was the last bit of beauty I would see in this world.

The moment was fleeting.

There came another colossal, World shattering bellow from that snaking sliver of gold. The sky seemed to shake with the thundering, and the crack began to tear open. The thin line pulled apart and became a gaping wound bleeding gold. I was transfixed by what I saw. Unable to speak, unable to move.

Mom did not raise me religiously, but somehow I knew I was staring into Heaven. It seemed an eternity that I sat there looking up into the hereafter. Everything seemed right. Like I had found a peace thought only possible in the abstract. Then came the screams.

They were distant at first, as if existing only on the periphery of reality. I pressed my ear hard to the glass trying to decipher what I heard. And all at once it hit me. I may have thought I was looking at Heaven, but what I heard pouring forth from it was Hell incarnate.

The screams of millions undulating through the air. Intersecting and melding in a chorus that made you wish your eardrums would rupture just to save you from hearing anymore. I clamped my hands over my ears, but that did nothing to muffle the cacophony. It was no longer coming from the sky above, rather, it was inside my head, twisting and contorting in my skull. I rammed my head into the window, over and over, trying to expel the screams.

If it didn’t stop I knew it was going to kill me. I was either going to break this glass or crack open my skull, and God was I hoping for the latter. Anything to make it stop.

Beyond the screams, the distant cries of my mother prodded at the edges of my perception. I could not find silence, instead I found myself being shaken by my mother. At some point she had stopped the car and pulled open my door. It hadn’t registered to me at the moment so I continued to slam my head against her chest. The screaming wouldn’t stop but soon that didn’t matter.

The cries reached a crescendo and just as I felt like my brain was going to pop, something splattered onto the top of my head. All at once there was silence. Whatever had landed on my head dripped down my forehead and into my lap. I looked down, still not aware of my mother holding me by the shoulders.There were dark stains on my pants, wet to the touch. Several more drops hit my head. Despite the pain, I muster the strength to look up. Heaven wasn’t there anymore. In its place sat a black hole of nothingness. The wind had come in a flurry, and the air went cold like death.

From that nothingness came a dark torrent of liquid. It crashed down into the earth violently, soaking the entire landscape. The obscenely strong scent of metal filled my nostrils. The liquid was thick and ran down my body. I brought my hands up allowing it to pool in my palms.

Blood. It was raining blood on the city. I watched it gather in my hands and run through my fingers, pooling below at my feet. It occurs to me at that moment that my mother is kneeling in front of me, begging me to tell her what is wrong. I look up and meet her eyes. Her face is slick with blood, her hair matted from the downpour. She’s looking at me with such concern but something is off. She isn’t reacting to the rain at all. I look around and see that the sidewalks are sparsely populated. They too do not react to what is happening. They go about their days, blood soaked yet seemingly unaffected.

Everything is covered in gore, but I’m the only one taking notice. I don’t understand it but there is nothing I can do. It’s the most helpless I have ever felt. Having no other recourse, I look back up. The sky stops bleeding and everything is still again. It’s over, it has to be, is what I think.

God, please let it be over.

The edges of the wound in the sky begin to tremble. It is slight at first, but soon turns raucous. I can feel a shift in the air. Whatever is coming next is going to be worse than the bleeding. So much worse.

From deep within the blackness comes a rumbling. I want to look away. Close my eyes and just make it all go away. But I can’t. I can’t look away, I need to know what is coming. The rumbling grows louder at a steady pace. I brace myself for another downpour.

Then it happens. Out fly the angels.

An endless stream of them spill out from the black, carried by wings white as bone. They descend upon the world and sail off in every direction. They are beautiful. No, rather they should be beautiful. But they aren’t. The more I look at them, the worse I feel.

One of them passes just above me. The moment was brief, but I saw enough. Its skin was a sickly grey, and its limbs stretched further than any human’s would. But what stuck with me was its face. There was nothing there. Just skin stretched across a skull.

Even though it had no face, I knew it had looked right at me. The sensation of meeting its gaze made me vomit. I’m stronger now, but that feeling still hits me deep in the stomach whenever they look at me. Sometime’s that’s the only way I know I’ve found one.

The sky continues to fill with white wings and my world starts spinning. My mother is still talking, but I can’t process any of it. Everything goes dark and the last thing I hear is the beating of the wings above.

I woke up in a hospital bed, my mother sleeping in a chair by my side. No blood. No screams. No angels. Just a sterile hospital room and the droning of nurses passing by the door. I must have made sufficient noise as I woke up because my mother quickly rose from the chair and darted to the side of the bed. She acted as if I had just come out of a years long coma. She held me close and I felt tears drop onto me. Once she was sure I was okay, Mom had her questions.

Still in a daze, her words reached my ears, but I wasn’t at all able to respond to them. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at my mother but not speaking. But at some point, I finally was able to open my mouth. In more of a yell than I intended, I asked, “What about Heaven?”

Mom fell silent and hit me with a look that was both puzzled and concerned.

“What?” she asked.

I asked again about what happened to Heaven, and this time she put a hand on my leg and leaned closer.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking, Honey. What about Heaven?”

I explained about the crack in the sky, the screaming, the blood, and the angels. All of it. She listened patiently, but her expression grew more worried as I spoke.

“You hit your head pretty hard, so I can understand having a disturbing dream like that,” she said after I had finished. My mother insisted I had hit my head on the window when she swerved to avoid a jaywalker in the road. I passed out, she said, and had been out until just a minute ago.

No, this wasn’t right. She had been there. Mom was there, and she saw everything. Pretending it didn’t happen wasn’t going to make everything okay, and I told her as much.

Before she could respond, someone stepped into the room. It was a doctor coming in to check on my status. Mom rose to her feet and pulled the doctor aside. They had a muffled back and forth before the doctor stepped over to me. She began to check me over while asking a series of questions. They were standard fare, and I answered them absent mindedly. My entire focus was on what had happened before I got here.

Did I really dream it all? That couldn’t be possible. It was all so real. I was completely lost in thought when it hit me. A deep sense of dread washed over me and I felt sick to my stomach. My head throbbed, and there was a sharp ringing in my ears. I doubled over, and both the doctor and Mom reacted quickly. My name was being called, so I did my best to look up at them. That’s when I saw it.

It had to stoop to fit in the doorway. Its wings were folded behind it but they were still visible. So bright it hurt to look at them, instead I brought my eyes up towards its head. Grey skin pulled taught around a skull and no features to speak of. Even without eyes, I could feel its gaze boring down to my very soul. It burned.

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even muster a whisper. I sat there, bile rising in my throat, watching it watch me. It raised its grotesquely thin arm and extended a gnarled finger in my direction. I think Mom must have seen the terror in my eyes because in that moment she turned her attention toward the door.

The angel was gone. It had slithered away down the hall in the second it took my mother to turn her head. Released from its watch, everything came out. I vomited onto the bed and probably the doctor too. I fell back against the pillow, and darkness came once again.

Thinking back on it, I don’t remember much after that. At some point I woke up again and eventually I was allowed to go home. Mom didn’t talk to me about Heaven again. I think it made her feel better to believe I had just had a bad dream. So, I didn’t talk to her about it either. It was hard being nine and alone in this new world. I scoured the internet for any mention of what happened that day.

Nothing.

Not so much as a word about what I saw. So, I went about life carrying the truth on my own. That was twenty years ago now, and in that time I have learned to adapt. Learned to survive in the new horrors born out of Heaven.

The work is hard. Some days I think about ending it all. But then I remind myself that’s what they want. For me to give up and give them this world. So, I carry on, collecting wings as I go. I’ve clipped 481 pairs so far. I got my first when I was sixteen. No one else can see them, so it’s left up to me to stop them. No one knows what they are, so they mourn them as you would people. Not me. I know exactly what they are, and I can see beyond the facade.

Tonight’s the night for another hunt. I’ve been tracking this one for two weeks. I saw him at the post office. Goes by Anthony Teller. To the rest of the world, he is an unassuming husband and father of two. But I know the truth. It flew into this world two decades ago and started walking among us.

It goes bowling Thursday nights. That’s when I’ll take it. It takes a dirt back road to avoid traffic on its way home. The trap is set. I’ll wait here, beneath the trees, always patient. You have to be when doing this work. The angels are clever and obstinate. So, my planning must be meticulous. My execution must be exact. I must be ruthless because I know they will show no mercy if I slip up.

I can hear the thing calling itself Anthony. By night’s end, I will have a new set of wings, and the world will be that much safer. I saw Heaven open up above me, and I will spend the rest of my life sending its angels to Hell below.

I was nine when I started seeing them. My mother was driving me home from school, and I slumped against the window in the backseat. The day had been normal, so normal in fact that I can’t recall anything specific preceding that moment. Mom was flipping through channels on the radio, indecisive as always, and everything was still. There was no sway in the trees, and there weren’t many people to speak of out on the streets.

I closed my eyes, lulled by the steady ebb and flow to Mom’s radio expedition. Then came the break. A roar came from above, reverberating through the air and shaking the Earth to the bedrock. I had never heard anything like it. There is no sound in space, but I imagine that is what the birth of the universe sounded like. Awesome and terrifying all at once.

I jolted in my seat and turned my eyes toward the sky. The day was clear, no clouds to speak of. And there, just below the Sun, a jagged crack had formed in the blue. Gold seeped out at the edges and spilled down upon the city.

It was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen before or since. At the time, I didn’t know it was the last bit of beauty I would see in this world.

The moment was fleeting.

There came another colossal, World shattering bellow from that snaking sliver of gold. The sky seemed to shake with the thundering, and the crack began to tear open. The thin line pulled apart and became a gaping wound bleeding gold. I was transfixed by what I saw. Unable to speak, unable to move.

Mom did not raise me religiously, but somehow I knew I was staring into Heaven. It seemed an eternity that I sat there looking up into the hereafter. Everything seemed right. Like I had found a peace thought only possible in the abstract. Then came the screams.

They were distant at first, as if existing only on the periphery of reality. I pressed my ear hard to the glass trying to decipher what I heard. And all at once it hit me. I may have thought I was looking at Heaven, but what I heard pouring forth from it was Hell incarnate.

The screams of millions undulating through the air. Intersecting and melding in a chorus that made you wish your eardrums would rupture just to save you from hearing anymore. I clamped my hands over my ears, but that did nothing to muffle the cacophony. It was no longer coming from the sky above, rather, it was inside my head, twisting and contorting in my skull. I rammed my head into the window, over and over, trying to expel the screams.

If it didn’t stop I knew it was going to kill me. I was either going to break this glass or crack open my skull, and God was I hoping for the latter. Anything to make it stop.

Beyond the screams, the distant cries of my mother prodded at the edges of my perception. I could not find silence, instead I found myself being shaken by my mother. At some point she had stopped the car and pulled open my door. It hadn’t registered to me at the moment so I continued to slam my head against her chest. The screaming wouldn’t stop but soon that didn’t matter.

The cries reached a crescendo and just as I felt like my brain was going to pop, something splattered onto the top of my head. All at once there was silence. Whatever had landed on my head dripped down my forehead and into my lap. I looked down, still not aware of my mother holding me by the shoulders.There were dark stains on my pants, wet to the touch. Several more drops hit my head. Despite the pain, I muster the strength to look up. Heaven wasn’t there anymore. In its place sat a black hole of nothingness. The wind had come in a flurry, and the air went cold like death.

From that nothingness came a dark torrent of liquid. It crashed down into the earth violently, soaking the entire landscape. The obscenely strong scent of metal filled my nostrils. The liquid was thick and ran down my body. I brought my hands up allowing it to pool in my palms.

Blood. It was raining blood on the city. I watched it gather in my hands and run through my fingers, pooling below at my feet. It occurs to me at that moment that my mother is kneeling in front of me, begging me to tell her what is wrong. I look up and meet her eyes. Her face is slick with blood, her hair matted from the downpour. She’s looking at me with such concern but something is off. She isn’t reacting to the rain at all. I look around and see that the sidewalks are sparsely populated. They too do not react to what is happening. They go about their days, blood soaked yet seemingly unaffected.

Everything is covered in gore, but I’m the only one taking notice. I don’t understand it but there is nothing I can do. It’s the most helpless I have ever felt. Having no other recourse, I look back up. The sky stops bleeding and everything is still again. It’s over, it has to be, is what I think.

God, please let it be over.

The edges of the wound in the sky begin to tremble. It is slight at first, but soon turns raucous. I can feel a shift in the air. Whatever is coming next is going to be worse than the bleeding. So much worse.

From deep within the blackness comes a rumbling. I want to look away. Close my eyes and just make it all go away. But I can’t. I can’t look away, I need to know what is coming. The rumbling grows louder at a steady pace. I brace myself for another downpour.

Then it happens. Out fly the angels.

An endless stream of them spill out from the black, carried by wings white as bone. They descend upon the world and sail off in every direction. They are beautiful. No, rather they should be beautiful. But they aren’t. The more I look at them, the worse I feel.

One of them passes just above me. The moment was brief, but I saw enough. Its skin was a sickly grey, and its limbs stretched further than any human’s would. But what stuck with me was its face. There was nothing there. Just skin stretched across a skull.

Even though it had no face, I knew it had looked right at me. The sensation of meeting its gaze made me vomit. I’m stronger now, but that feeling still hits me deep in the stomach whenever they look at me. Sometime’s that’s the only way I know I’ve found one.

The sky continues to fill with white wings and my world starts spinning. My mother is still talking, but I can’t process any of it. Everything goes dark and the last thing I hear is the beating of the wings above.

I woke up in a hospital bed, my mother sleeping in a chair by my side. No blood. No screams. No angels. Just a sterile hospital room and the droning of nurses passing by the door. I must have made sufficient noise as I woke up because my mother quickly rose from the chair and darted to the side of the bed. She acted as if I had just come out of a years long coma. She held me close and I felt tears drop onto me. Once she was sure I was okay, Mom had her questions.

Still in a daze, her words reached my ears, but I wasn’t at all able to respond to them. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at my mother but not speaking. But at some point, I finally was able to open my mouth. In more of a yell than I intended, I asked, “What about Heaven?”

Mom fell silent and hit me with a look that was both puzzled and concerned.

“What?” she asked.

I asked again about what happened to Heaven, and this time she put a hand on my leg and leaned closer.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking, Honey. What about Heaven?”

I explained about the crack in the sky, the screaming, the blood, and the angels. All of it. She listened patiently, but her expression grew more worried as I spoke.

“You hit your head pretty hard, so I can understand having a disturbing dream like that,” she said after I had finished. My mother insisted I had hit my head on the window when she swerved to avoid a jaywalker in the road. I passed out, she said, and had been out until just a minute ago.

No, this wasn’t right. She had been there. Mom was there, and she saw everything. Pretending it didn’t happen wasn’t going to make everything okay, and I told her as much.

Before she could respond, someone stepped into the room. It was a doctor coming in to check on my status. Mom rose to her feet and pulled the doctor aside. They had a muffled back and forth before the doctor stepped over to me. She began to check me over while asking a series of questions. They were standard fare, and I answered them absent mindedly. My entire focus was on what had happened before I got here.

Did I really dream it all? That couldn’t be possible. It was all so real. I was completely lost in thought when it hit me. A deep sense of dread washed over me and I felt sick to my stomach. My head throbbed, and there was a sharp ringing in my ears. I doubled over, and both the doctor and Mom reacted quickly. My name was being called, so I did my best to look up at them. That’s when I saw it.

It had to stoop to fit in the doorway. Its wings were folded behind it but they were still visible. So bright it hurt to look at them, instead I brought my eyes up towards its head. Grey skin pulled taught around a skull and no features to speak of. Even without eyes, I could feel its gaze boring down to my very soul. It burned.

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even muster a whisper. I sat there, bile rising in my throat, watching it watch me. It raised its grotesquely thin arm and extended a gnarled finger in my direction. I think Mom must have seen the terror in my eyes because in that moment she turned her attention toward the door.

The angel was gone. It had slithered away down the hall in the second it took my mother to turn her head. Released from its watch, everything came out. I vomited onto the bed and probably the doctor too. I fell back against the pillow, and darkness came once again.

Thinking back on it, I don’t remember much after that. At some point I woke up again and eventually I was allowed to go home. Mom didn’t talk to me about Heaven again. I think it made her feel better to believe I had just had a bad dream. So, I didn’t talk to her about it either. It was hard being nine and alone in this new world. I scoured the internet for any mention of what happened that day.

Nothing.

Not so much as a word about what I saw. So, I went about life carrying the truth on my own. That was twenty years ago now, and in that time I have learned to adapt. Learned to survive in the new horrors born out of Heaven.

The work is hard. Some days I think about ending it all. But then I remind myself that’s what they want. For me to give up and give them this world. So, I carry on, collecting wings as I go. I’ve clipped 481 pairs so far. I got my first when I was sixteen. No one else can see them, so it’s left up to me to stop them. No one knows what they are, so they mourn them as you would people. Not me. I know exactly what they are, and I can see beyond the facade.

Tonight’s the night for another hunt. I’ve been tracking this one for two weeks. I saw him at the post office. Goes by Anthony Teller. To the rest of the world, he is an unassuming husband and father of two. But I know the truth. It flew into this world two decades ago and started walking among us.

It goes bowling Thursday nights. That’s when I’ll take it. It takes a dirt back road to avoid traffic on its way home. The trap is set. I’ll wait here, beneath the trees, always patient. You have to be when doing this work. The angels are clever and obstinate. So, my planning must be meticulous. My execution must be exact. I must be ruthless because I know they will show no mercy if I slip up.

I can hear the thing calling itself Anthony. By night’s end, I will have a new set of wings, and the world will be that much safer. I saw Heaven open up above me, and I will spend the rest of my life sending its angels to Hell below.

*There is motion at your Front Door*  

Every night this week I’ve gotten this notification. There must be something wrong with the camera because whenever I check the feed, there’s nothing there. At first, I thought maybe it was bugs setting it off, but that doesn’t seem to be it. I’ll check the recording back and there is always absolutely nothing on the camera. No people, no animals or bugs, not even an errant leaf caught in the wind. 
I tried looking online for help, but that has so far been a fruitless endeavor. Suggestions ranged from low battery to dirty lens, but I tried everything and it still keeps reacting to nothing. I decided to get an entirely new camera. The thought occurred to me to just forgo the camera and just be done with it, but ever since someone tried to break into my house, I’ve been too paranoid to go without one. So, new camera it is. 
It will be next day delivery, so whether I liked it or not, I’ll be going cameraless.. That’s fine. I live in a nice enough area, and there have been no problems with burglaries since the attempt last year. I’ll just have to be extra vigilant. It’s only one night.
I feel pretty vulnerable right now. Irrational, I know, but I can’t help it. I’ve always been an anxious person, and I’ve never felt completely comfortable living alone. It might’ve just been a camera, but it gave me a sense of security in an uncertain world. Whatever. I just need to get to sleep and stop thinking about it.
It’s 1:23 am and there is knocking at my door. It’s soft, but in the still of the night each knock comes down like thunder on my door. The sweat is like ice rolling down my skin, and I’ve started shaking. Damn it. There’s never anyone out at this time around here, and there is definitely never anyone coming to my door at this time or any other. 
I pull off my blanket and step off the bed. The knocking comes again. Three quick strikes to my door. I’m unsteady on my feet; the shaking has only gotten worse. I look over my room frantically, searching for something that passes as a weapon. Why would someone be here? Why are they knocking on my door? Why does it have to be me? I can’t quiet my brain and I can’t find anything to defend myself. 
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Damn it, it's getting louder. I need to do something. My panic is reaching a fever pitch when I finally remember. My closet. I sprint towards it and nearly rip the sliding door off its track. There in the corner is my baseball bat. Not a perfect weapon, sure, but it’s all I have. My hands are slick with sweat and shaking, so I have a hard time gripping the bat. 
Get it together. Deep breaths. I tighten my grip and march out of my room. Standing at the top of the stairs, I stop and listen. Nothing. Not even the wind breaks the silence. I hold at the top of the stairs for several moments. Maybe they went away. Maybe they–
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
No, they are still there. The knocks land heavy and rapid this time. Okay, this is actually happening. Someone is at my door and they seem to very desperately want me to answer it. I pull the bat close to me and drag myself down the stairs.
   I’m face to face with my door now. Too afraid to look out, I put my ear to the door. Breathing. I can hear them breathing through the door. God, what do I do?
I recoil from the door, my whole body shaking violently now. The sweat has soaked my shirt and now it clings tightly to my back. I have to do this. I take a breath and slam my eye into the peephole.
Black.
There’s nothing there. Why? Why can’t I see anything? I pull back and try to clean the lens. Still nothing. I’m losing my mind. What is going on? I’m about to scream, but then it hits me. 
It’s them.
They put something in front of the peephole. Damn it, damn it, damn it. This isn’t really happening, it can’t be. I can feel the tears welling in my eyes. They sting and I can feel my legs losing their strength. Then it comes again. Furious knocks hammering my door. I lose it.
“Damn it, what the hell do you want? Just go away!” I scream and slam my fist into the door. I nearly fall to my knees but I’m able to steady myself. Maybe that worked. I’m not an intimidating person, but maybe my yelling was enough to send them away. I lift my head towards the peephole.
The moon is a sliver of silver in the sky and the street beyond my house is empty. There’s no one there. The relief washes over my body, and I let myself drop. Thank God it’s over. I steady my breath and let my mind settle into a semblance of calm. I sit with my back resting against my door for a little while longer.
Using the bat as leverage, I bring myself to my feet. I lay a hand on the door before making my way to the stairs. My body is still shaky and my mouth is desert dry, but at least I made it through. My legs feel heavy, so even the first step seems like a challenge. I’ve conquered two whole steps when my uneasy peace is shattered.
Crazed pounding assaults my door and sends me stumbling backwards. I slam painfully into the wall as the fist slamming into my door only accelerates its pace. The fear coursing through my body has chased the cowardice away. My unsteady hands fumble with the locks, but I am determined this time. I raise the bat over my head with one hand while the other turns the knob and swings the door open.
An animalistic scream, I didn’t think I was capable of, rose up through my throat as I prepared to confront whoever was beyond the door.
No one. Only silence and an empty porch are there to meet me. I step out and scan the area. Nothing and no one is there. A neighbor’s lights come on so I scramble to get back inside. I slam the door and fully collapse once I’m inside. 
What the hell is going on? Am I losing my mind? No, there was someone there. There had to be. Damn it, why did I have to be without a camera on the one night I desperately needed one? I’m confused, I’m terrified, and I am exhausted. But I know sleep is not going to come tonight, or maybe any night ever again. I’ll spend the rest of the night in front of my door, bat clutched tightly to my chest.
Slants of light break through my kitchen blinds, and I know morning is here. The day brings comfort, albeit small, and allows me a reprieve from my vigil. The front door looms large in front of me. The fear of what happens if I open it again has burrowed into my heart and has made my mind hazy. Barely able to think, I lumber towards the door. I don’t know what I’ll find in the light of day, but I have to know. Throwing open the door, I prepare for the worst. But. just like last night, I find the area devoid of life. 
I slink back inside and breathe an uneasy sigh of relief. I don’t know what I expected, but I’m glad I found nothing. Coming back to my senses, I look at my watch. I have enough time for a modicum of sleep, I decide, and collapse onto my couch.
I’m sleep deprived and still half a step away from a panic attack, but I manage to get myself up and ready for work. I get halfway down the walkway when I’m stopped by my neighbor. 
“I’m not one to complain, but last night was really a lot,” she says.
Well, I should have expected this. With my screaming and the knocking was probably loud enough for them to hear.
“Oh, yeah. Look, I’m really sorry about all that. It wasn’t fun for me either, but I really don’t know how I could have avoided it.” I say.
They look at my puzzled for a moment, then with annoyance.
“ Okay, well, I would suggest getting a spare key,” she says.
“What?” I have no idea what she is talking about.
“A spare key so you don’t get locked out of your house again”
“Oh, no. That wasn’t me. I don’t know who was at my door last night,” 
She really seems upset now.
“You don’t have to lie. We’ve all had rough nights. Just, please keep it down next time.” She says this and turns to leave. I’m beyond confused now, and a wave of unease crashes over me.
“No, really, that wasn't me. I–”
She doesn’t stop but gives a curt reply.
“I saw your face.”

  

   

    

 

I was nine when I started seeing them. My mother was driving me home from school, and I slumped against the window in the backseat. The day had been normal, so normal in fact that I can’t recall anything specific preceding that moment. Mom was flipping through channels on the radio, indecisive as always, and everything was still. There was no sway in the trees, and there weren’t many people to speak of out on the streets. 
I closed my eyes, lulled by the steady ebb and flow to Mom’s radio expedition. Then came the break. A roar came from above, reverberating through the air and shaking the Earth to the bedrock. I had never heard anything like it. There is no sound in space, but I imagine that is what the birth of the universe sounded like. Awesome and terrifying all at once. 
I jolted in my seat and turned my eyes toward the sky. The day was clear, no clouds to speak of. And there, just below the Sun, a jagged crack had formed in the blue. Gold seeped out at the edges and spilled down upon the city. 
It was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen before or since. At the time, I didn’t know it was the last bit of beauty I would see in this world. 
The moment was fleeting. 
There came another colossal, World shattering bellow from that snaking sliver of gold. The sky seemed to shake with the thundering, and the crack began to tear open. The thin line pulled apart and became a gaping wound bleeding gold. I was transfixed by what I saw. Unable to speak, unable to move. 
Mom did not raise me religiously, but somehow I knew I was staring into Heaven. It seemed an eternity that I sat there looking up into the hereafter. Everything seemed right. Like I had found a peace thought only possible in the abstract. Then came the screams.
They were distant at first, as if existing only on the periphery of reality. I pressed my ear hard to the glass trying to decipher what I heard. And all at once it hit me. I may have thought I was looking at Heaven, but what I heard pouring forth from it was Hell incarnate.
The screams of millions undulating through the air. Intersecting and melding in a chorus that made you wish your eardrums would rupture just to save you from hearing anymore. I clamped my hands over my ears, but that did nothing to muffle the cacophony. It was no longer coming from the sky above, rather, it was inside my head, twisting and contorting in my skull. I rammed my head into the window, over and over, trying to expel the screams. 
If it didn’t stop I knew it was going to kill me. I was either going to break this glass or crack open my skull, and God was I hoping for the latter. Anything to make it stop.
Beyond the screams, the distant cries of my mother prodded at the edges of my perception. I could not find silence, instead I found myself being shaken by my mother. At some point she had stopped the car and pulled open my door. It hadn’t registered to me at the moment so I continued to slam my head against her chest. The screaming wouldn’t  stop but soon that didn’t matter. 
The cries reached a crescendo and just as I felt like my brain was going to pop, something splattered onto the top of my head.  All at once there was silence. Whatever had landed on my head dripped down my forehead and into my lap. I looked down, still not aware of my mother holding me by the shoulders.There were dark stains on my pants, wet to the touch. Several more drops hit my head. Despite the pain, I muster the strength to look up. Heaven wasn’t there anymore. In its place sat a black hole of nothingness. The wind had come in a flurry, and the air went cold like death. 
From that nothingness came a dark torrent of liquid. It crashed down into the earth violently, soaking the entire landscape. The obscenely strong scent of metal filled my nostrils. The liquid was thick and ran down my body. I brought my hands up allowing it to pool in my palms. 
Blood. It was raining blood on the city. I watched it gather in my hands and run through my fingers, pooling below at my feet. It occurs to me at that moment that my mother is kneeling in front of me, begging me to tell her what is wrong. I look up and meet her eyes. Her face is slick with blood, her hair matted from the downpour. She’s looking at me with such concern but something is off. She isn’t reacting to the rain at all. I look around and see that the sidewalks are sparsely populated. They too do not react to what is happening. They go about their days, blood soaked yet seemingly unaffected. 
Everything is covered in gore, but I’m the only one taking notice. I don’t understand it but there is nothing I can do. It’s the most helpless I have ever felt. Having no other recourse, I look back up. The sky stops bleeding and everything is still again. It’s over, it has to be, is what I think. 
God, please let it be over.
The edges of the wound in the sky begin to tremble. It is slight at first, but soon turns raucous. I can feel a shift in the air. Whatever is coming next is going to be worse than the bleeding. So much worse.
From deep within the blackness comes a rumbling. I want to look away. Close my eyes and just make it all go away. But I can’t. I can’t look away, I need to know what is coming. The rumbling grows louder at a steady pace. I brace myself for another downpour. 
Then it happens. Out fly the angels. 
An endless stream of them spill out from the black, carried by wings white as bone. They descend upon the world and sail off in every direction. They are beautiful. No, rather they should be beautiful. But they aren’t. The more I look at them, the worse I feel. 
One of them passes just above me. The moment was brief, but I saw enough. Its skin was a sickly grey, and its limbs stretched further than any human’s would. But what stuck with me was its face. There was nothing there. Just skin stretched across a skull.
Even though it had no face, I knew it had looked right at me. The sensation of meeting its gaze made me vomit. I’m stronger now, but that feeling still hits me deep in the stomach whenever they look at me. Sometime’s that’s the only way I know I’ve found one.
The sky continues to fill with white wings and my world starts spinning. My mother is still talking, but I can’t process any of it. Everything goes dark  and the last thing I hear is the beating of the wings above. 
I woke up in a hospital bed, my mother sleeping in a chair by my side. No blood. No screams. No angels. Just a sterile hospital room and the droning of nurses passing by the door. I must have made sufficient noise as I woke up because my mother quickly rose from the chair and darted to the side of the bed. She acted as if I had just come out of a years long coma. She held me close and I felt tears drop onto me. Once she was sure I was okay, Mom had her questions. 
Still in a daze, her words reached my ears, but I wasn’t at all able to respond to them. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at my mother but not speaking. But at some point, I finally was able to open my mouth. In more of a yell than I intended, I asked, “What about Heaven?”
Mom fell silent and hit me with a look that was both puzzled and concerned. 
“What?” she asked. 
I asked again about what happened to Heaven, and this time she put a hand on my leg and leaned closer.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking, Honey. What about Heaven?”
I explained about the crack in the sky, the screaming, the blood, and the angels. All of it. She listened patiently, but her expression grew more worried as I spoke.
“You hit your head pretty hard, so I can understand having a disturbing dream like that,” she said after I had finished. My mother insisted I had hit my head on the window when she swerved to avoid a jaywalker in the road. I passed out, she said, and had been out until just a minute ago.
No, this wasn’t right. She had been there. Mom was there, and she saw everything. Pretending it didn’t happen wasn’t going to make everything okay, and I told her as much. 
Before she could respond, someone stepped into the room. It was a doctor coming in to check on my status. Mom rose to her feet and pulled the doctor aside. They had a muffled back and forth before the doctor stepped over to me. She began to check me over while asking a series of questions. They were standard fare, and I answered them absent mindedly. My entire focus was on what had happened before I got here. 
Did I really dream it all? That couldn’t be possible. It was all so real. I was completely lost in thought when it hit me. A deep sense of dread washed over me and I felt sick to my stomach. My head throbbed, and there was a sharp ringing in my ears. I doubled over, and both the doctor and Mom reacted quickly. My name was being called, so I did my best to look up at them. That’s when I saw it. 
It had to stoop to fit in the doorway. Its wings were folded behind it but they were still visible. So bright it hurt to look at them, instead I brought my eyes up towards its head. Grey skin pulled taught around a skull and no features to speak of. Even without eyes, I could feel its gaze boring down to my very soul. It burned.
I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even muster a whisper. I sat there, bile rising in my throat, watching it watch me. It raised its grotesquely thin arm and extended a gnarled finger in my direction. I think Mom must have seen the terror in my eyes because in that moment she turned her attention toward the door.
The angel was gone. It had slithered away down the hall in the second it took my mother to turn her head. Released from its watch, everything came out. I vomited onto the bed and probably the doctor too. I fell back against the pillow, and darkness came once again.
Thinking back on it, I don’t remember much after that. At some point I woke up again and eventually I was allowed to go home. Mom didn’t talk to me about Heaven again. I think it made her feel better to believe I had just had a bad dream. So, I didn’t talk to her about it either. It was hard being nine and alone in this new world. I scoured the internet for any mention of what happened that day. 
Nothing.
Not so much as a word about what I saw. So, I went about life carrying the truth on my own. That was twenty years ago now, and in that time I have learned to adapt. Learned to survive in the new horrors born out of Heaven. 
The work is hard. Some days I think about ending it all. But then I remind myself that’s what they want. For me to give up and give them this world. So, I carry on, collecting wings as I go. I’ve clipped 481 pairs so far. I got my first when I was sixteen. No one else can see them, so it’s left up to me to stop them. No one knows what they are, so they mourn them as you would people. Not me. I know exactly what they are, and I can see beyond the facade. 
Tonight’s the night for another hunt. I’ve been tracking this one for two weeks. I saw him at the post office. Goes by Anthony Teller. To the rest of the world, he is an unassuming husband and father of two. But I know the truth. It flew into this world two decades ago and started walking among us. 
It goes bowling Thursday nights. That’s when I’ll take it. It takes a dirt back road to avoid traffic on its way home. The trap is set. I’ll wait here, beneath the trees, always patient. You have to be when doing this work. The angels are clever and obstinate. So, my planning must be meticulous. My execution must be exact. I must be ruthless because I know they will show no mercy if I slip up. 
I can hear the thing calling itself Anthony. By night’s end, I will have a new set of wings, and the world will be that much safer. I saw Heaven open up above me, and I will spend the rest of my life sending its angels to Hell below.