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You should fear them.
© Lightspeed Magazine
You must be ready to deal with the consequences.
Youll lie to yourself, that you were only begging for guidance, for strength.
Youll lie to the media afterward.
This isnt what you wanted at all.
You may believe the lie.
They may believe the lie.
But she knew the truth the moment she heard your invocation.
And if youre smart, youll accept it.
Youll have a better likelihood of surviving the war.
The one you prayed for.
She introduced herself with the two good teeth she still had left in her skull.
Ground them right into my left forearm.
Later shed say that shed tried to shake me first.
Im not sure I believe her.
It was hard to miss her, even in the early-morning gloom of my bedroom.
Her crown of fire mustve burned a foot high.
I wouldnt recommend looking directly into one.
Certainly not once it reaches its full potential.
Girl, she said.You called me.
She was speaking directly into my head.
My parents do not sleep soundly.
No, I responded wordlessly.
Or was this the first lie I told myself?
Id just had a dream, a vision.
who was it, again?
Panic robbed me of language.
You showed me the rampart of sin, she said.Built of the flesh of man.
I will bring siege to it as you asked.
I dont have any armor, I managed.
Then I ran to my bedroom wastebasket and vomited.
The sun was just starting to peek through the curtains.
She stared at me through black sockets.
How many matins in a row, now?
You see inside my body as well as my mind.
A holy light shows all.
I see what you need.
Now, my armor.
Bring them to me.
I didnt ask why, like a sane person would.
Resolved, the saint said.I shall wear no armor but the mantle of God.
But, I say from my head, all I need is some gas money.
Its the next state over, but the rides not too bad.
Show me this clinic down the road.
The medica has indeed gone to God.
I sat on my bed.
Yup, I thought to the bones.
The saint clacked up to me on timeworn toes.
She bid me to get dressed, to pack lightly.
I followed her orders.
Christ hung on a foot-high cross over the mantle.
We snuck outside, bundled my things into the truck.
She inspected it like a general.
What bastion of sin?
I thought to her.
But first, I will need more bones.
Penitents make pilgrimages to see their saints.
Saints make their own pilgrimages.
Those routes, we cant see.
My saints path made sense only to her.
She rode shotgun, wagging her antique-white fingers toward this highway exit or that.
In Louisiana, we liberated a crowbar from a junkyard.
The dogs there lowered their eyes at our approach.
Be this a sword?
I couldnt help it.
It made my condescending laugh sound like a croak.
Next day, my saint brandished the crowbar as we burst into the Church of St. Joseph.
A certain St. Valerie awaited us under a canopy of glass and gilded copper.
Where did you come from?
I asked my saint somewhere along the Floribama line.
A catacomb, she said.A lump of ash.
A rotting rope swinging from a tree.
Let the thought pass.
With every leg bone, my saint grew taller; with every shoulder and hip bone, broader.
Her face creaked as she wrenched out a mandible to make room for more hyoids.
Soon her arms undulated like kite strings whenever she cracked a window to feel the breeze.
My legs must be more robust, my saint said.
I hadnt known my radio was on.
As we crossed a county line, a local talk station blasted awake.
Beware, the radio said.
Beware the many trying to destroy everything pure and good.
Who would put condoms in every school, and child-killing pills there too.
I, the saint said,was born into the arms of our lord.
We sourced additional femurs from a St. Frances in New York.
My saints shanks swelled into a pair of siege towers, groaning with age and fury.
My car broke down a few days later, but by then shed outgrown it.
She took strides the length of a city block.
Her ribs wound round and round her torso like a bandolier.
In that high, protective cradle, we slept.
Sometimes we spotted a police car pacing us, cherry lights dim.
The media didnt know what to make of us.
We crossed into Mississippi a second time.
I assumed it was at the invitation of another saint with a bone to spare.
We are here, the saint said.
We were looking at a flat, one-story building with a steel fence and razor wire around it.
Its another clinic, I said.
They were blocking the entrance.
The rampart of sin, I thought.
A wall of human flesh.
I was sitting on a clavicle, close to the warmth of her halo.
My saint had amassed stacks of patellas on either shoulder, reminding me of cannon fodder.
The twelve-year-old girl huddled in my saints rib cage.
The saint loped toward the fence separating the angry crowd from the clinic.
She lifted a foot.
She meant to escort us inside.
A crack rang out from the ground below.
I looked down into the ribcage.
The twelve-year-old was staring at the palm of her left hand.
There was a hole in it.
For a second, I felt like I was forgetting to breathe.
I looked up at the top of my saints head.
A fire was spreading through me, too, a seething heat I had feared, had denied.
My saint steadied me on her shoulder.
I found one of the patella bones and felt the heft of it in my hands.
I aimed at a man in camoprint coveralls and threw.
My saint swung around, arms pivoting like trebuchets, elongated fingers positioned to crush.
Several of the men below hadnt.
My saints body rumbled with dozens of impacts.
She had many, many bones.
She opened her mouth, and I crawled in.
If I die here, I said, make my bones your aegis.
The words blasted out of her like a horn of Gabriel.
There was not a person manning that hell gate who did not hear me.
Another man had joined the first below.
He saw me through my saints left eye socket.
He bore a semi-automatic weapon so chunky and modified it looked like a handheld tank.
I met his eyes, I leaned out, and I smiled.
I had to twist my neck to do what came next.
A disk popped somewhere behind my molars, and I couldnt help it.
Then I searched once again for the halo atop my saint.
The light bore into the backs of my eyes, and I saw, at last, the glory.
Hamms work has appeared inStrange Horizons,Kaleidotrope,Diabolical Plots, and more.
Hamm lives in Los Angeles and writes under the protective blankie of a pseudonym.
Hamm can be found on Bluesky @hammonddiehl.bsky.social.
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