"Who—who are you?"
I look around me, but nothing except darkness surrounds me. I can't even see my own hands, and whenever I try to throw them around me, I can't touch anything. I have no idea whether I'm walking either since I don't even feel something under my feet. It feels like I'm inside something that's not just a dark room, but some kind of space that doesn't even exist. Yet, I heard the echo of footsteps and that voice seemed like it was coming out of multiple speakers at once, far but close to me for some reason, while my own voice had been swallowed by the darkness as soon as I screamed that question.
"What is happening? Who are you?"
"Funny how I get these two questions every time."
I jump and turn around, at least, I think I'm turning around, as soon as I hear that same voice again, this time as close as a whisper in my neck. But when I throw my hands around again, I can't feel anything around me.
"If I tell you what's happening or who I am, what do you expect to do with those informations?
I move my legs to run, even if there's nothing under me. Because now, the voice starts getting further away. So I run, not knowing where I'm going, not knowing if I'm going anywhere at all. I do that for a while, but I'm not out of breath and my heart isn't racing. I'm not breathing at all. I have no heartbeat at all.
"You know, usually, I don't take time to explain everything I'm saying right now to other beings."
I hear some hazy background noise, multiple screams on top of a distant siren. People are yelling, asking to make way, while somebody is opening some doors. And I also hear...
Waves.
Rain.
"But you're not quite like the other beings I usually deal with."
With the last step I take out of the darkness, I suddenly emerge into a light that blinds me. My knees touch the wet floor as I crawl with my eyes half-closed, and I press on my ears, now pierced by a strident alarm sound. Blue and red colors blur into the yellow jackets of some people running around and the trail of white lights left by speeding cars. I can feel the rain pouring on me, yet my body doesn't feel cold. When I bury my head in-between my knees to escape to the light, I stare right at my hands.
And I see the raindrops fall right through my hands full of blood.
I slowly lift my head and look around me. I look at all those people coming out of their cars to run towards the shore of the river, with the highway bridge right on top of our heads, while some men in police uniforms try to stop them and make way for the paramedics, trying to fish something out of the Han River, the ambulance doors open and waiting for them. Further from there, there's a car, half-turned and completely crushed on the sharp stones of the shore.
It looks like the car I bought after working for several sleepless days. The car I wished I could have bought with my dad, but bought with my brother-in-law instead.
Now, the paramedics are finally pulling someone out of the water. It's a woman, her hair as long and black as mine. They put her on a medical emergency bed and run off to the ambulance, while one of them is on top of her to do CPR. As they pass by, me and all the other witnesses finally get to see the woman.
I stare at my bloodied face full of open wounds until the very last moment they put me inside that ambulance.
And my dead body stares right at me with lifeless eyes until the very last moment before they close the ambulance doors.
When I turn my head to the side, I realize I can't even see a shadow of myself on the lighted shore as the ambulance lights get away.
I take a few steps back, my legs shaking. I stumble and fall on the stones, without feeling an ounce of pain. I try to grab a stone, but my hand clenches on emptiness. I start walking on my knees and try to hold onto the jacket of a man going back to his car, but I can't touch it and my arm falls on the ground. With ragged breath, I get on my feet, run, scream, bump into people, try to shake them, hit them, but everytime, I pass right through them and fall on the stones again. Nobody hears me. Nobody notices me.
"Conversations like these are always the same."
There goes that same voice again. But this time, I can finally see who it belongs to.
Still on my knees, further from the crowd, I flip my head to the side. I raise my eyes all the way from the newly polished black shoes to the black pants on long and muscled legs, up to the large torso covered by a thick neck-long black sweater and a long black coat, and to the face of the man observing me. He has a large but emaciated face, his discernable bones giving him sunken cheeks and high cheekbones making his eyes seem more gaunting. His chiseled jaw is beardless and while there is no human imperfection on his pale complexion, his skin isn't smooth either because of the cracks all over his face that seem to be about to break, like on the glass of an antique, still solid but old-looking. His hair is pulled back into a bun, its color as pale as his skin, its white contrasting with his black clothes, but in perfect harmony with his glassy eyes still glaring at me. There is a large black fedora on top of his head, that he adjusts as he keeps staring at me.
"The easiest ones are those who see me as their loved ones when we meet. They follow me without a complaint." His large lips stretch into a smirk. "There's also the ones that don't even see me, because they never even believed in the afterlife, so why would someone be fetching them for it? Those just disappear quietly, in peace with the nothingness they've just met, which might, perhaps, be the best option; why would a dead being want to be conscious even in the afterlife? Haven't they been aware of their own existence for too long while they were alive?"
The man takes a deep breath and turns to the river to observe the waves still crashing on the shore, with the rain pouring harder with each minute, its drops still going right through me. And I keep seeing my own lifeless eyes looking at me, while I listen to the man, unable to mutter a word.
"The people who've been scared of me their whole lives usually see me in the worst possible form I could take in their worst nightmares. They're easy to collect too, because they're too scared to try and argue with me. But the worst are those who see me just the way you do. They give me an appearance similar to theirs. They want to see me like one of them, so this way, they think they can negotiate with me. First, they ask me who I am, and what's happening to them. Then, they whine and scream, asking for more time to say goodbye to their loved ones, one last chance to make up for their mistakes, one last shot at life. They talk about how unfair it is, how they've done nothing wrong and lived honestly, so they deserve to live. They always talk to me as if I were responsible for this. They think of me as the cause, but I'm the consequence. They think of me as the action, but I'm the reaction."
He turns back to look at me and makes a few steps towards me, before his smirk turns into a full smile and he starts walking away. I see only now the convertible sports car standing right behind him. He gets into it and starts the engine, the car headlights suddenly flashing to light the river, without drawing the attention of any of the people still around us as if they couldn't see it. Then, he stares back at me and makes a quick sign for me to join him.
"I could tell you that we have all the time in the world, but death doesn't wait. So hop in."
"Wh—Why?" My voice is as shaky as my whole body, as I slowly get up. The man seems to notice it too, since he starts looking at me from head to toe.
"You're dead. You can't shake. You can't breathe. You're pretending to have human reactions without knowing it. Stop it."
My body freezes the second he says that, my blurry view suddenly clearing up as colors now seem faded as if someone had pulled down the saturation and the brightness on a picture. I try to take a breath, but it doesn't have any effect on my body. It's weird how I don't even feel like I'm in it, but I can still move it and walk with it, like it still didn't wake up from anesthesia.
"Where are you taking me?" Now, even my voice seems clearer.
"Not to the afterlife. Not yet. I told you, you're not quite like the other beings I usually deal with. Get inside."
I don't feel like I'm pushed by any kind of outside force inside the car, but I can tell my legs don't move out of the entirety of my free will. I sit next to the man, feeling uneasy because even if he no longer looks at me, I still feel like his eyes are on me.
He turns around the car, now facing the road, but he doesn't move yet. The headlights get brighter as the traffic in front of us gets more dense. He makes the engine roar a few times, the smirk on his lips getting bigger. Then, he stares at me through the side view mirror. But I have no reflection on it.
"Get ready. This is only a glimpse of the power I could offer you."
"Wha—"
He starts driving the car without letting me finish. We get shaken as the wheels have trouble rolling over the stones smoothly. Nonetheless, the car gets faster with each new rock throwing me on one side then the other. Then we pick up speed : the closer we get to the cars in front of us, the faster the wheels turn, the harder the engine roars and the higher the trail of black smoke it leaves behind goes. Until the headlights get too close to the road and it's becoming too late to stop and insert calmly into the traffic.
"Ya! You're heading right at all those cars! Stop or—"
The man bursts out laughing. His laugh gets more intense with each second we get closer to collide into the many other cars on the road still driving, unaware of the danger coming right at them.
"Come on! I don't want a second car accident tonight!"
I brace myself and clench one bloody hand on the door handle, contracting my muscles only to realize that it's pointless, because my body wouldn't hurt anyway. So I close my eyes and take a deep breath, just out of habit.
"Fine. Go ahead."
I open my eyes when the car abruptly stops and I get thrown on the dashboard, the headlights still a bit further from the road. I turn to stare at the man and I find him quietly observing me. His laugh has finally died out. But he doesn't even smirk. He just looks at me with a rigid expression, his eyes seeming even whiter now.
"You are one interesting creature, indeed... maybe I can finally understand what Azrael saw in you."
We look at each other in the silence, until the engine roars again. And the man powers the car to propel it right onto the road.
Ten seconds, and we collide into the first person.
Nine seconds, and somebody's car gets destroyed like me.
Eight seconds, and somebody else dies like me.
Six seconds, and somebody else loses a father like me.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Zero.
We crash into the first vehicle as our car stops, the wheels at the back lifting and throwing both of us forward. But we stay halfway thrown into the air while everything else around us keeps moving. Even the car we just hit just drives as if we didn't bump into it.
And everything around me breaks like glass.
Literally.
It starts with a small crack at the exact spot where we collided into the car. Then the cracks grow bigger, go further and they intertwine to form a spider web falling upon us like a dome that traps us inside the broken glass of a picture. Before the first piece of sky falls on me, and the cracks before us get wide open to break Seoul into a large and dark pit that eats us up.
My scream fades away as our falling car picks up speed, and we keep going down. Down. Down. Down.
Suddenly, out the endless bottom of the dark pit, a flash of white light emerges. Like shooting stars, many jets of red, yellow, blue, pink and purple lights come our way, lighting the smiling face of the man, now looking more like a corpse than I do under these blinding neon lights. Gawking at all those lights passing by, I carefully and reluctantly get my hand out to touch them.
The moment a purple gleam brushes the tip of my fingers, it explodes into a thousand small pieces of flares, in every shade of purple, that whirl all around me. It doesn't hurt; merely tickles. So I take the courage to get my whole upper body out of the window, the endless fall hitting me like wind as more light jets keep coming my way and pass through me, each time ending up in powerful and luminous stellar explosions. A laugh gets past my lips, as a light sensation takes over me, giving me the impression that I could fly in this space if I got out, like it's freeing me of the anesthesia that's taking over my whole body.
Suddenly, the wheels of the car bump onto something and we suddenly start to drive on a smooth surface. I lean out of the window to look under us, and discover my own reflection : my forehead is still full of dried blood, that's streamed down my glassy eyes, like those of the man driving next to me, and went all the way down my almost skinless chin and my throat where a piece of glass is stuck. I'm taken aback by this sudden image of myself, but before I can even stomach it, something in that reflection I'm staring at hits me.
There is no longer just me and the flashing lights flying around me.
The glass surface we're driving on reflects our new surroundings. The flares around us are now hitting the darkness around us like bolts of light to let out small pieces of a night sky full of stars of thousands of colors. These pieces grow until I can clearly see that we're no longer in a pitch black pit, but in the heart of a city that stretches before my eyes in lighted skyscrapers and gigantic advertisements panels covering up a red moon.
But I'm looking at it vertically.
Because the surface we're driving on is the multiple windows of a high building. And by pulling back my hair hit by the wind, I can see we're getting closer to the sideways full of people talking on the phone and walking in big groups like sheeps. But they're not Korean. And this place isn't Seoul.
I see the infamous large tower with a Coca-Cola ad of Times Square we're driving on, lighting the yellow taxi cabs and the Big Bus of New-York the moment the car hits the floor full of people to break it in millions of pieces like earlier, and get us right into a new place.
We still drive sideways on a building, but this time, the building is a large circular tower, its shadow falling on a bridge beneath it. A bit further from it, there's a geyser fountain. People are gathered around, walking past it or sitting by it to face the impressive statue built in front of it, surrounded by a flower pool. The sun, high in the sky, reflects upon its face, finely sculpted out of darkened bronze. It's a man, sitting upright on a podium, holding a stick with a dignified face, dressed in a suit covered by a cloak, with a cap on top of his head. His eyes are looking beyond all the people gathered under him, almost looking like he's staring at me from this distance.
Before we, once again, collide into the ground to crack open it, I see Kenyan flags aligned behind the statue of Jomo Kenyatta.
Soon, everything is replaced by the finest example of Mughal architecture seen in the white facade of the Taj Mahal in Agra, until its gardens become the vividly colored one of the Palace of Versailles, and then the old bricks of the royal palace get replaced by the even older bricks full of the history of many countries of the Aya Sophia in Istanbul. We drive on the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum of Rome, the Great Sphinx of Giza, the walls of Son Doong cave in Thailand and I see many status going high up in the skies, like those of José Rizal in the Philippines, Harriet Tubman in Michigan, Jesus Christ in Brazil, the Angel of Independence in Mexico, the African Renaissance Monument in Senegal and so on.
Until we dive right into the floor and suddenly emerge to drive on the rocky surface of a place I don't recognize through my dream destinations, my favorite photographs of Eric Lafforgue, Hannah Reyes Morales or QT Luong or any apparent flags. This time, we go all the way down from the small mountain we were onto the floor, but the car finally starts driving vertically, the wheels now leaving a trail of hot sand behind as we make our way through the endless desert lighted by a huge burning sun going down like a fireball.
One by one, small figures start to come out of the horizon. At first, I can't make out what or who they are. But as we get closer to one another, going in opposite directions, their human features become more apparent with their slender legs and arms going sideways and their bodies moving on small boards under their feet, as if they were skateboarding on the sand. However, the moment we finally pass by each other, them going their way as if they didn't even notice us, I can finally see up close the black linen wrapped all around them, barely showing their bony physique, only letting out their snowy hands, their constrained feet almost turned blue because there seems to be no blood in them, and finally their faces. Faces of walking bodies with only one eye and a huge mouth without lips, with sharp teeth.
As I get past one of them, I feel a chill going up my spine despite the natural lack of reaction of my body. The chill becomes an uncontrollable shake as I'm soon warped in the cold of a snow blizzard, coming my way when we suddenly get out of the desert through a crack, to end up driving in the middle of a grand marketplace out in the open where we get past people without them turning away from the products they analyze in front of many colorful and small shops.
There are people of all shapes and colors. Some are large monsters with greenish or red skin, others are a pile of crippled bones with faces like those of famous gothic gargoyle status. A lot of them have two arms and two legs like me, but oftentimes, their skin is either of an unusual color or an unusual material, or they have an extra feature like wings or a tail, their faces changing with some having horns, others weirdly shaped eyes or illuminated tattoos on them. The shop panels are all written in symbols of a language I don't recognize in an alphabet I'm not even sure exists, while some of the purple flags with the image of a dove on it are completely unfamiliar to me.
Before I can further analyze my surroundings, they're completely replaced with mountainous hills peaking high in the dusty sky, a rain of ashes falling upon the crates left on them by the powerful explosions going all around. I fold my arms on my head, trying to cover my ears as bombs fall near the car in strong blasts, but each time, the man manages to avoid them, throwing me in every side of my seat, laughing as if he was having the time of his life : which might very be a possibility, given how he doesn't stop even when we're driving right through a battlefield.
Battle cries pierce through the air as people throw themselves on others, their swords gleaming in fresh blood. Some scream as they spit bits of flesh out of their sharp teeth, while others dig their long claws or the tail or spider legs coming out of their backs into the bodies of those in heavy armor who've already fallen.
As the car picks up speed, the wind washes away the ashy sky to soon let it be a sunny one. But while the weather seems less apocalyptic, what it lights there, on the ground we pass by, is even bloodier than what I've just seen. Gun bullets fly with each new shouting followed by the fall of a body on the dirt of the ground, and the blood of thousand of men, now without a special skin or feature, splashes the Israeli and the Palestinian flags.
Soon, we're propelled onto newer places, newer pictures, newer faces, newer flags, but the smell of corpses left there stays the same, the atmosphere filled with the fear they felt during their last breath stays the same, the expression of their faces that'll never light up with life stays the same. No matter where we drive by, the tragedy stays the same.
It's not just battlefields I see. It's also sick people wrapped in thin blankets dying on the streets and others giving the food they hungrily look at to their children to starve instead of them. But the result is always the same : no matter what they look like, these people just die in loneliness, without ever being able to fight against the cruelty of what life gave them, death looking like a salvation next to what they had to endure.
And we drive and drive until the moment we're back under the rain, on a highway in Seoul, and the car stops so abruptly, its back wheels get up before roughly falling back on the rainy floor, making me jump out of my seat.
We stay on the side of the road, looking at all those cars driving with fireworks exploding in the sky.
"Demons, humans... you think of yourselves differently from one another, but you're all the same," the man suddenly snaps, hitting the wheel with the tip of his fingers at the rhythm of the ticking clock on his wrist, that I only notice now as if it just appeared out of the blue, adjusting his black fedora with the other hand. "They live like they're in Earth on Hell, while you live like you're in Hell on Earth. They're no different than you : they have their own countries, their own languages, their own cultures, and their own wars. They're just like all those stories you made up about them, and very different at the same time. They talk about humans in their own tales, too. You'd be surprised to know that most of your respective civilizations built on the example of the other, so much so that even I can no longer tell who came first, and I've been around for a long time. But despite your differences, you're always craving for the same need of power, that's always fed by the same kind of fear when you think about your own mortality. Because in the face of war, sickness, famine and death, you're all the same. And... the angels are no exception either.
At that very same moment, wind hits me in the face when something quickly passes a few inches before me. And time slows down as thousands of pure white feathers cover up my view and take away my breath, gently grazing my cheek with flickers of gold following their trail as the man before me flies in the air, his fierce look fixated on something that's on the road. His long black ponytail brushes his large shoulders, a few hairs grazing his slim face shining as if his skin had been newly polished and drawn to serve as a model for what perfect features should look like.
The moment I touch the tip of a feather, still gawking in amazement, time goes back to its normal speed and the angel flies away as quickly as a storm, stopping in the middle of all those passing cars.
"These damn angels move so fast, I have to slow down time if I want to watch them properly whenever they do something interesting," the man mumbles, looking displeased as he keeps his focus on the angel now standing in the middle of the road.
And unlike for the man, me and the white car, drivers do seem to notice his tall body standing atop the floor with his wings flapping in the air, giving out powerful blasts of wind that doesn't have any effect on my hair, but threatens to throw the people walking on the sideways atop the bridge. Because when the first car brutally stops in a shrieking sound of honking, the second car bumps right into it and so do the third, the fourth, until a chain of accidents follow and the first car gets thrown in the air with the impact, falling back a few meters away from there, completely turned upside down.
Out of reflexe, I grab the door handle and try to get out, as if I could do anything at all. But out of the corner of my eye, I see the man raising a hand and suddenly, my body just stops responding to any of my commands and I freeze.
"Don't get out of this car. Or you'll go somewhere even I can't save you from. Remember that for the next time."
When he lets his hand fall, I can finally move my hurting muscles, when I can't even understand why they hurt in the first place since I'm not supposed to be feeling anything. Yet everything that man did to me had a real impact on my body as if it could still feel something. So I'm guessing every ominous thing he says, hinting at how powerful he really is, isn't some kind of show-off.
"Focus on what's happening. I didn't bring you all the way here for you to admire me instead of this magnificent show."
I can now clearly see the face of the angel, still standing atop all those cars who've just had a chain accident because of him. But he clearly doesn't seem to care any less about them, as he keeps his blue eyes focused on the only man standing on his feet on the other side of the road. That one has bleached hair thrown in the back with massive hair gel, his sharp features looking even more grim with the lights of all the cars now forming a blockade in front of him, his sunken eyes looking more murderous with the black liner he's put on, his brows with a piercing on the left side furrowing all the more as the angel keeps staring at him, and he keeps staring at the angel.
But, when he tries to take a step forward and falls on his knees, I see that the hand he kept pressing on his stomach is full of his own blood. And when I notice that the blood on the long spear the angel is holding is probably the same, I understand that the danger might not be the person I thought it would be at first.
"That man... is he a human?" Surprisingly, that question just came out of my lips on its own.
"No. Samael's an angel too. One who hasn't used his wings in a long time, because he refused to serve the need of power of other angels like that other one, who'll kill him in the blink of an eye. Gabriel."
"But why is Gabriel trying to kill Samael?"
"A long time ago, they asked Samael to kill the angels that have rebelled and fight for God's big plan for the universe. What's ironic is that none of the angels who've asked him that, nor did any angel in history ever met God or could prove His existence. But they were willing to use him to cover their heinous crimes and the war they've started to invade other planes of existence, at first because theirs became unlivable, and then because it just became a way to prove that they were more powerful than the angels that have rebelled and betrayed them. The Fallen Angels."
"And Samael refused to fight against the Fallen Angels? So he joined them?"
"No, he just ran away. Stopped using his wings and lived in the human realm for thousands of years, constantly tracked by Gabriel, so constantly in hiding."
"Why did he run away instead of allying with one side or the other?"
"Because he didn't want to kill either of his siblings, no matter the side they chose to be on."
They're all siblings and yet they're at war? To the point where one like Gabriel is looking ready, even satisfied from what I can tell with that smile on his lips, to kill those who've accepted their fate like Samael, who keeps breathing on his knees, steadying himself as if to get ready for an honorable death.
"Gabriel finally managed to get hold of Samael in Seoul, right on this highway. And as you can see, he took all the chances on his side to not let him get away again like he did for thousands of years," the man explains.
I look at all the cars with their fronts and backs destroyed, their drivers unconscious and bleeding behind their wheels, ambulance sirens approaching without being able to make way because the road is blocked, the people on the sideways who have fainted, either because of the accident, which is unlikely, or simply for looking at the angel wings.
"Why are we watching this?" I blurt out, this accident bringing me back old and very unpleasant memories. It seems like they don't give me any rest, even in death.
"You wouldn't ask me this question if you were looking in the right direction."
He points at the first car that almost bumped into the angel. It's still a bit further from the accident site, near our car, turned upside down with its window glasses shattered. While the driver is still inside the vehicle, there's a person that's been propelled out of their seat, lying in a pool of blood, but too far away for me to see their face. Yet I can tell it's the body of a child, given how small and weak they look, and probably a girl who has long black hair, now soaked in blood and rain.
And the man driving was probably her father, who stopped moving and breathing, still inside a car... that also reminds of old and unpleasant memories.
This can't be, right?
This can't be... that night, right?
The man unconscious inside the car turned upside down can't be my father, right?
And that girl lying in a pool of blood on the road, thrown out of the front window, can't be me, right?
"Look a bit further."
I do as he says and I finally see it. There, on one of the many tall buildings of the city, there's a flashy high panel on a building far from there, showing : "WELCOME 2005".
"See? It's not your first rodeo with death."
When I turn my wide open eyes to the man, I scream and press against the door, completely frozen. Because he's no longer the same.
His skin has shedded to leave him like a hairless squelette, staring at me with his empty eyes, the fedora on his head replaced with a large black cloak falling on his whole body, only the clock still around his wrist staying the same.
Just endlessly ticking.
Ticking. Ticking. Ticking.
Tick, tick, tick...
"I am Death. And you... you've met me twice, Mun Soo-jin."