Messengers - 10

He didn’t think that it was simply because the angels had told her to. As she had put it, if you were given a message like that, you had to check it out, didn’t you? But that didn’t mean that if Dylan had turned out to be an alcoholic with an explosive, violent temper, that she had to marry him. Unless he was really hot or rich. She was joking about that last part. He hoped.

But the whole notion of angel marriage spun right back around to the same question that Dylan always came back to. Did these things happen because the angels said they would or were they just reporting? Were they predicting the future or creating it?

***

“Those fuckers were wrong,” he said.

He, in this case, was Johnny Maxwell, who was twenty years old, heavily tattooed and had a weird sort of foul mouthed charm. That he seemed completely unawed by the angels was just a side bonus.

Johnny pulled out his cellphone and fiddled a bit with it, slid it across the table to Dylan.

“You ever read a story called An Appointment in Samara?” Johnny said.

“Sure.”

“Yeah, I had to read in AP English. I figure my teacher wanted me to read the fucking thing because of the messages. It was the first fucking thing I thought of when I got that shit on my phone. And they say you’ll never use that shit once you get out of school.”

Johnny laughed and took a drink of coffee. They were sitting at the same table that Dylan and Molly met at. Dylan still sat there, even though things weren’t going the best with her. He tried not to think about it, and the irony of trying not to think about it while sitting at this particular table was not lost on him. He looked at the text messages on Johnny’s phone.

“Jonathan Maxwell will die at 9:47 on January 7, 2011”

Dylan had vetted Johnny pretty thoroughly before he decided to interview him. Not surprisingly, there were lots of crazy people that claimed they got messages from the angels, and a lot of people that were simply looking to be famous, and that was aside from the legitimate people that wanted to tell him their stories. He didn’t have time to talk to everyone, so he did his damndest to make sure that the people

This was easier when the people had voice messages recorded. The angels had a very distinct sound, one that didn’t lend itself to easy replication. If someone had a recording like that, the odds were good that they weren’t faking. Not impossible, but you had to balance the amount of time spent vetting versus the time it would take to interview them.

Newspapers were another easy indicator. It was possible to fake a newspaper with a message in it, but it was difficult. Dylan had actually had four people that had tried to do just that, taking the time to try and mock up a newspaper.

These had varied from laughably transparent, cutting out letters and gluing them to the newspaper, to sophisticated, where an entire fake newspaper was printed. That last one might have worked if it weren’t for some stories taking place that occurred after the newspapers were printed. The angels might have the ability to predict the future, but he was pretty sure that beat reporters didn’t.