by Chloe Garner
“The keys are in the ignition,” he said. Trevor let go of her hands, and Robbie hugged her hard.
“Am I never going to see you again?” she asked. “Is that what this is?”
“For important things,” he said softly. “Lara traveled, but it was always a risk.” He paused, then hugged her again, speaking into her hair. “Be careful.”
And then he was gone, and she was alone with Trevor.
“I can’t,” she said. He kissed her cheek, right above the corner of her mouth, where she was trying not to cry.
“You can,” he said, resting his forehead against hers. “Now go do it.”
He kissed the other cheek, squeezing both of her arms where he held them at the elbows, then he turned and he went into the house.
And closed the door.
She closed her eyes, unable to cope for that second.
She could just go back in there. Tell them they were all wrong. All crazy. That this couldn’t be how it happened.
But when she opened her eyes, a furling was coming out of the door, creeping toward her.
They weren’t going to stop.
And when she didn’t leave, they were going to kill her.
Maybe they would anyway. She didn’t have any proof that anyone ever followed up on angels that had been run out like this.
But it was the only chance.
She backed toward her car, watching it creep after her on strange legs, silken, oily fur rolling over gaunt muscles.
She got in.
She started the engine.
She drove away.
***
She wandered.
She drove north for a while along the coast, which was familiar, but at the same time, she was uncomfortable, like there wasn’t something right with her seat. When she mistakenly got off a ramp and started heading east, she was able to relax for the first time since she’d left the house.
Not that she felt better.
She cried off and on, feeling abandoned and stupid and manipulated and very helpless. She hated everything, and for a time she considered pulling over and just having it out with the furlings. Let them kill her, if that’s what they were going to do.
But she had a cell phone.
She wasn’t alone in the way that she could have gotten away with it.
Someone would have found her and they would have figured out who she was, and Robbie would have found out and then Trevor would have found out, and she didn’t want to think about how either one of them would have taken it.
She had a responsibility to them, to her little brother that she had watched over his entire life and to a man that she loved more than her own heart, she had a responsibility to survive, no matter how miserable it made her.
So she kept going.
Day after day, she kept going.
At first, she thought she’d discovered a sort of compass to getting where she was supposed to go, but it was hardly reliable. She wandered excessively, sometimes in circles, trying to figure out what direction she was actually supposed to go. She found a wad of cash in her purse from Robbie, and she spent that on food and gas, and then just on gas as she worked her way progressively east, crossing the Mississippi for the first time in her life, then the Appalachians, and then she parked the car in a little town in Virginia and went and sat on the beach for a while.
She couldn’t stay. She could feel it even as she sat that she would have to move again soon, but she had a few hours before the furlings started attacking her for not behaving. She pulled out her phone and looked at it, but she’d been sleeping in the car, and she didn’t have an adapter to charge it off of the cigarette lighter, so it had been dead for most of a week.
She wanted to call Trevor.
She wanted to hear his voice, to have him tell her that she was going the right direction, that she was doing it right and it was going to be okay.
Not that he would have.
He wasn’t the comforting type, but she could at least imagine it in his voice.
She sat until the sun went down, then she went back to her car and started driving again.
A week later, and at the very end of her cash reserve, she pulled off of the interstate in Pittsburgh, and the drive was gone.
She went to park in a gas station parking lot, and she leaned out over her steering wheel and looked up at the dark sky.
This was it.
She knew nothing about the place, she knew no one here, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do, but she was here.
She filled the tank and pulled back out of the parking lot, looking for a private place to sleep for the night.
She’d figure it out in the morning.
***
In the morning, the plan was no more clear than it had been the night before. She was parked in an industrial sector that had been dead the night before, but as the sun started to come up, cars and bigger vehicles started going past her and woke her up, so she started the engine and, for no reason in particular, she started driving again. She needed to stop soon. There was no point burning gas just because she didn’t have anything better to do; she didn’t have but a couple of twenties left in her purse, and she was going to miss those when they were gone.
She pulled into a residential shopping center a while later, not far from the more urban center she’d been driving through, and she got out of the car, stretching.
A furling scampered across the hood of her car and went running off into the bushes, and, for lack of better direction than that, she followed.
After about twenty minutes, she lost that one, and she wandered aimlessly back toward town until she saw another one and she followed it. Another and another and another, countless miles, until dusk started to set, and she looked up and realized she had no idea where she was. She pulled her phone out of her purse reflexively to get a map, but she had the twin realizations that she still hadn’t been able to charge it, and she had no idea where she’d been when she left her car.
Her charger, worse and worse, was in the car.
She sat down on a curb and put her head in her hands, not crying, not because she felt any better than she had when she’d first left Lara’s house, but because she’d long since run out of tears.
The nights were cold, this far north and this far into the fall, and she wasn’t dressed for it. None of her clothes would have been warm enough, if she’d had all of them to pick from, and she didn’t. She wandered a bit further, finding an alley where the wind didn’t seem to cut through it too badly - a reasonably good place to stay, from the smell of human waste there - and she sat against a wall with her body curled around her purse and, feeling very sorry for herself, she slept.
***
She woke up in the middle of the night when something went scampering past her in the dark. She was shivering and cold, and someone was snoring not far away. She wasn’t sure if she’d heard a rat or a furling, but she didn’t think it mattered, either.
***
She’d never learned how to track furlings the way Trevor and Robbie did. That was the problem, she decided the next morning. If she could figure out how to track them, she would ultimately discover the hooligans, which was where she needed to start. That much, she was sure of.
She didn’t want to think about what would happen after that, but there wasn’t anything she could do until she knew what she was dealing with. Who she had to work with. Maybe there would be someone like Lara or Robbie who could give her a place to live for a little bit while she figured the rest of it out.
She refused to think about the fact that Lara was the one who had had the place to live, the angel, and that the rest of the hooligans had struggled to keep it together well enough to hold a job and pay for that kind of expense, because dwelling on that kind of thing didn’t help. She needed to find a way forward. That she didn’t want to think about the future that lay along that path was not relevant to the fact that she had to do it.
She found an everything store, one
of the little ones where most of the aisles were full of bins of cheap toys, and she bought herself a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter, then went out to sit on another curb and ate most of it. She hadn’t eaten the day before, she was so intent on following furlings. She put the rest of the container of peanut butter and the bag of bread into her purse and stood, looking around.
There were furlings out. She could see them as they went by, just little flashes of black fur, and she could increasingly feel where they were, but it didn’t help. They were too far away and too fleeting for them to do her any good. She went back into the store and waved at the cashier.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a phone charger I could use for twenty minutes or so?” she asked. The girl looked up from a magazine, and Lizzie shrugged.
“My phone died and it’s going to be a while before I get back to my charger. Could I plug it in for a bit and let it charge?”
“You’re just going to hang out?” the girl asked, and Lizzie gave her a little smile.
“Do you mind?”
The girl shrugged.
“Whatever.”
She dug underneath the counter for a minute and pulled out a cord, plugging it into the wall and holding out her hand palm up. Lizzie took out her phone and handed it over, watching after it for a minute, then nodding and wandering away. Just standing there was too awkward.
She went back to the periodicals section and browsed magazines for a little while, then she heard the girl call her.
“Uh…”
Lizzie leaned so she could see the register, and found a furling standing on the counter.
“You,” she said sternly. The furling straightened and looked at her, mesmerized. “Come here.”
“What?” the girl asked as the furling trod forward.
“Not you,” Lizzie said. She looked up to see that the girl was holding her phone by the cord, out away from her body. It was smoking.
“No,” she said, then looked at the furling, who grinned and dashed away. “No.”
She grabbed the phone and unplugged it violently, but it was too hot to touch.
“No.”
She was shouting now.
“Sorry,” the girl said, turning away and giving her a corner-of-the-eye glance that told Lizzie that she thought Lizzie was a bit crazy. Lizzie put the phone against her forehead, ready to cry again, then pulled it away before it burnt her and shoved it into her purse, going out the door and walking.
Walk faster.
Just walk faster.
The phone had had all of her phone numbers on it.
She’d never written them down. Never memorized them.
It was the only way she had to communicate with Trevor and Robbie. There was no house phone at the house, and she didn’t know anyone else’s number to call to get to them.
She was alone.
Walk faster.
She was blinking now, hungry and abandoned and alone with no plan, no car, and no money. She was crossing a park, randomly, when a bolt of bright white light shot up through her so violently she couldn’t see.
She stopped short, letting her eyes drop closed. It was like the earth had opened up and let her tap into it. She shifted a fraction to her right and the power of the thing shot higher. She could feel all of the furlings for a distance her mind had no way to measure, feel the gray-blob people, but most importantly, she could feel the hooligans creeping around her, herding furlings this way, away from traffic, away from buildings, away from the great density of people at a shopping area not far away.
And there.
There.
That was the demon.
A great, black bend in the world with a grip on it like concrete, there, drawing in the furlings, creating the center of the field.
There was no angel. Or, at least, if there was, Lizzie couldn’t see her.
It was a battle. Right now. And she was here for it, the way she was supposed to be.
Just for a minute, it was home.
And then the demon shook the ground at her, and she felt her feet wobble.
Trevor had never done that to her. She hadn’t even known it was possible.
The furlings went nuts, swirling around themselves, no hooligans inciting it, just that earth-deep thump like everything had suddenly dropped two feet. Lizzie struggled to stay on the light, struggled to remember how she’d cracked open the ground and pulled herself across it, destroying the furlings, but she couldn’t manage it. Couldn’t remember the feel of it. It had been so long, and so much had happened since then.
She clung to the shaft of light, pushing it out, reaching for the hooligans around them, trying to get a feel for how they were working.
The pack was perhaps a little smaller than the one she’d been in, with Trevor and Robbie, but they moved right, squeezing the furlings forward, tempting them or pushing them, hopping and screaming and fighting amongst themselves.
The demon shook the ground again, and the furlings went up to fever pitch. Lizzie almost fell over.
What was that?
What was he doing?
She gripped at the light, mentally, trying to react, to counteract, to do something, but the furlings were insane, fighting with each other, climbing trees and other structures that were harder to identify, throwing themselves back down to the ground in bigger and bigger fights.
It hadn’t been more than a minute or two, and the hooligans weren’t even in place yet, but the furlings started merging. Fights grew bigger. Lizzie realized with an angry frown that there were too many of them.
She snagged a few nearby as they got too close, absorbing them, but she couldn’t reach the worst of it, and the furlings were rapidly blowing up. The closest hooligans were already breaking away, and the furlings were pouring into the biggest fight, merging and growing faster and faster, and then it was over.
There was only one left, and he climbed up onto something and jumped once, twice, and then disappeared as that thing crushed beneath him.
Lizzie gasped and opened her eyes, dashing along the path to see what had happened.
A tall piece of equipment, slides and climbing wall and ladders, had toppled over, bent at the legs, and children and parents were yelling, trying to get everyone out of it, off of it, children with gaping mouths grasping at bloody injuries. Lizzie put her hand to her mouth and watched, unable to help but unable to simply walk away until someone grabbed her shoulder and spun her.
“What the hell was that?” he asked. She viscerally reacted to him, a heaving disgust, the way she’d felt toward Trevor’s crackhouse, if it could have turned into a person and stood too close to her.
“You’re the demon,” she said.
“You didn’t do anything,” he said. “You think you’re here to watch us do all the hard work? We bring ‘em in, you do something about them. It isn’t that hard, princess.”
“That was so fast,” she said. “There wasn’t anyone here to pull them apart.”
“That’s your job,” he said. “You failed.”
He shoved her shoulder and turned to walk away. She stood, unable to figure out the right way to react, and he turned back to face her.
“You’re worthless, but apparently you’re the one they’re sending.”
She blinked, and he threw up his arms.
“You expect me to carry you?”
She scurried forward, and he turned before she got to him, continuing on such that all she got was a good look at his back.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Back,” he said. “And after a fail like that you don’t get any more questions. Shut up and don’t annoy me.”
She frowned, hoping that he was just annoyed at how badly that had gone, that it had been a long, hard wait for an angel to show up to fill a gap, but she had a sense that that wasn’t the case.
She was in for a long afternoon.
***
They trudged a long way across town, back into a region wit
h a lot of block-shaped buildings with broken windows and occasional boarded doors. The man, who hadn’t spoken to her since the park, pushed through a sheet of particle board and into a dank darkness that Lizzie recognized with a sense of despair.
There was no comfortable living room to gather in afterwards.
She swallowed and followed on, hearing the sounds of creatures in the darkness, the smell of humans driving her to the verge of sickness as they came to a spindly staircase that went up the inside of the far wall. They went through one floor and continued up, through what had once been a doorway onto the roof, where at least moving air kept the scent from dwelling quite so heavily. Scattered around the half-wall at the edges of the roof were a dozen or so street ruffians, the same look and feel as Robbie’s pack, but instead of just agitated and evasive, these were reactive to Lizzie and the huge man arriving, scattering into clusters that broke apart at their simple proximity to each other.
“This is her,” the man said, turning to hold an arm out at Lizzie. “We’ve been waiting for an angel to show up to give you guys some hope of controlling them, and here she is. Useless.”
Lizzie straightened. She might not have been ready to help, but she was going to learn, and in the meantime, this wasn’t helping.
“I didn’t get your name,” she said.
“Beelzebub,” he said. She glowered.
“That’s not your real name.”
“You think I’m not the demon?” he asked, growing towering and leaning toward her slightly.
“We just call him Zee,” someone muttered at her elbow, and she looked down to find a cowering young man, all bones.
“Shut up,” Zee roared, motioning like he would have hit the poor young man if he could have reached him. The man scrambled away, looking mistrustfully at both Zee and Lizzie. She looked around the rooftop once more and sighed.
“Is this where everyone lives?” she asked.
