Midnight's Angels - 03

by Tony Richards

  “They were transformed, not killed,” the sergeant pointed out. “So where the hell’ve they gone?”

  He got his answer the next second. There was a sudden blur of movement at a distant intersection. A shape sprang into view and then headed in our direction quickly. We tensed up and drew our weapons.

  As it got closer it seemed to divide, and we figured out what it was. Not one shape but two. A pair of running humans, untransformed as yet. A man and a woman. Each of them seemed to be carrying a bundle. I could see legs swinging, so these were two small children. And their parents were running for all four of their lives.

  By the time they’d reached the final intersection, it was clear that they were terrified.

  And with good reason. Other shapes had begun appearing in the street behind them. Several dozen of the things.

  It suddenly occurred to me. A barrier like this worked both ways. We could not get in to help these people. And there was no way they could get out. In trying to stop the plague from spreading, the adepts had trapped the last survivors.

  Ritchie was already on his cell phone, trying to raise Judge Levin. But apparently with no success. What the hell were those guys doing? They ought to be able to sense this.

  I stepped up and thumped at the barrier with both fists. It let out a hollow ringing sound, but didn’t budge.

  The family had reached it by the time I’d registered that. Both of the parents were dressed in black. They were in their late twenties, and would have made a handsome-looking couple. But the terror on their faces had flensed that away.

  I’d no idea how long they had been running, but they looked breathless and exhausted.

  And I was afraid at first that they would run headlong into the barrier, not even taking in the fact that it was there. But they noticed it at the last moment, realizing what it was. They skidded to a halt. And then gazed at me helplessly.

  The man freed up a hand and pressed his palm against the inside of the wall.

  “Can’t you help us?”

  The child under his arm, a small boy, started whimpering. And that really tore at my insides, like some wild animal was chewing through my gut. I’d had a son as well. I’d had a family. And they’d been trapped behind a wall like this one, on the day that magic had taken them away from me.

  It made no sense, I knew it. But something in me snapped. And I threw myself against the barrier, pounding at it with my shoulder as hard as I could. The only results I got were more of those hollow booming sounds. Like trying to push your way through several inches of plate glass, albeit that it was yielding very slightly.

  I swiveled around, bruised and breathing heavily. Ritchie had gone to the radio in his car and was trying to raise the judge by way of a dispatcher. But he still seemed to be getting nowhere.

  “What’s going on?” I yelled furiously.

  He shook his head.

  And this was incomprehensible. Adepts like Levin and Willets and Vernon constantly noticed disturbances like these, casting out their inner powers the length and breadth of this whole town. So how come they didn’t understand we needed help here? But then I thought I got it.

  Perhaps they couldn’t make out what was going on beyond the barrier. But they were still aware of me and Ritchie, surely? So I tipped my head back, calling to them at the top of my voice.

  “Hey! For God’s sake, fix this!”

  There was no response. What were they thinking of?

  The young parents were practically hysterical, the children in their arms both shrieking out loud. The scuttling shapes in the background were still coming. And there was a new development I didn’t like one little bit. Their mouths were wide open, like before. But this time, they were letting out creaking, clicking sounds that reminded me all over again of insects.

  “Please!” the woman was shouting at me. “Don’t leave us in here!”

  I could hear her perfectly clearly. But there was not a thing that I could do to help. I stared into her face, torment welling up inside me. In another few moments, they’d be overwhelmed. Would turn into the same kind of creature as the mindless horde approaching them.

  My mind had practically gone blank. My body felt like it was drifting. If I’d been able to risk my own life to save theirs, then I’d have done that. But I wasn’t even being given that option. I’d been turned into a helpless spectator. And my teeth clenched, but I couldn’t even look away.

  The others were still bounding across, their bare palms smacking on the asphalt. I wasn’t even breathing, by this time. The woman started screaming, and that seemed to tear my head apart. I slammed at the barrier with everything I had. Except that simply wasn’t good enough.

  When suddenly, it parted in front of me.

  What the …?

  I hadn’t done that.

  The family came tumbling through, the woman crashing up against me and the man falling to his knees on the blacktop. The translucent wall closed again next instant, sealing itself up. Several transformed humans slammed against it and bounced off.

  We paused, satisfying ourselves that none of them were getting through. Then we untangled ourselves from each other.

  “By the Goddess, thank you, sir, so very much!” the woman gasped. She started crying.

  But I knew perfectly well that it hadn’t been me who’d saved her. Probably, one of the adepts had finally taken notice. Except I had no idea why they’d been so long about it. Me and Ritchie hustled the whole family in the direction of our cars. I had a hand around the woman’s shoulders, and could feel how badly she was shaking.

  “Are there anymore?” I asked.

  She was still in tears and didn’t answer. Had buried her face in her daughter’s hair and seemed to be shutting everything else out. But her husband managed to take in my question, and fumbled around for a reply.

  “When it started, there were plenty of us,” he murmured dazedly. “Those things were mostly coming from Morgana Park, but we outnumbered them. We tried to fight back, using magic. When that didn’t work, we tried to run.”

  He paused and shuddered visibly.

  “I guess the rest got picked off. But I didn’t see it. I was too busy trying to get my kids out.”

  And then he stared at me with eyes as round as coins.

  “Some of those things … they look like people that I know. What are they?”

  There was no time to explain. I was about to tell him that. When the point was illustrated with horrible clarity. A familiar glow came into view on the darkened street behind us. Then a second one.

  Two of the angels were headed this way. And I had not the faintest notion if the barrier would hold them.

  CHAPTER 20

  What Ross had said kept nagging at her, tugging at the edges of her conscience. Had his words managed to worm that far into the way she felt? Not that she hadn’t thought about that stuff an awful lot since she had come out here. Hell, there wasn’t much else she could do. She’d thought about it every single day.

  Cassie hadn’t caught a fish this evening, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She didn’t feel especially hungry, her gut flipping over. She had lit a fire all the same. It had become a ritual that she went through every evening. Building the pile of thin twigs, then adding bigger ones.

  But that had been more than an hour back, and she hadn’t bothered to stack it up to its usual size. She watched it as it dwindled, the darkness tightening its grip around her.

  The night air was much cooler that it had been a few days ago. Goose bumps had sprung up on her arms, and she rubbed at them pensively. Her life had become so simple out in this quiet, isolated place, consisting of just basic actions. Wake up. Exercise. Get some food. Light the fire. Eat. Then sleep, and wake again. She loved it, in a strange sort of way. It felt like traveling on some constantly ebbing and rising tide that she had no control over whatever. And on that level, why bother with thinking stuff through anyway? What possible difference could that make?

  She tipped he
r head back, gazing at the firmament. Man, but the stars were so bright out here. Back in East Meadow, she had barely ever noticed them, save when she was outdoors and had drunk too much. With the streetlamps in the way, they had seemed faint and distant, barely real. But here in the forest, they glimmered so intensely that she felt she could reach up and brush her fingertips against them.

  When she tried … dampness welled up in her eyes. It caught her unawares. She hadn’t felt especially sad before she’d raised her hand. So what was this about?

  She became aware of the tremendous gap between what she was doing and how she was feeling. All she’d physically done was stretch up her arm. But it felt -- between one instant and the next -- like she was reaching out for her three missing children, trying to get them back.

  That big red star in Orion. That might be Kevin, mightn’t it? That bright blue one further across? Angel, possibly?

  That tiny one that kept on winking down at her, as if it knew her? Little Cassie? Yes?

  Hi, babe!

  Goddamn, she was thinking crazy stuff. And so she let her arm drop back and wiped her eyes.

  When she stared at the fire again, it had burnt down to its last few dancing orange shoots. And that was when her gaze lifted a little higher, out of instinct, and she noticed something genuinely odd.

  The whole two months that she’d been out here, every single night, a gentle, steady glow had persisted to the east of her, beyond the tall peaks of the trees. It was the electric lighting of the town itself, and never varied. Cassie had come to regard it as a constant, like the moon and stars.

  And you’d really notice it, now wouldn’t you, if the moon glowed duller or a few stars started to go out?

  The same kind of thing had happened, right before her eyes. The glow from the town diminished. What the …?

  Her old behavior asserted itself. She was on her feet in a split-second, her fists tightly clenched, her breathing ragged. Then she caught hold of herself and calmed down a little.

  Tried to tell herself it might just be a power outage. But it didn’t feel like that. She could almost sense it. And she’d always had these very strong instincts, whenever there was something wrong. They were pounding at her consciousness by this stage, like a series of harsh blows. Her hands would not unclasp. Her breath was hissing though her nostrils.

  Ought she go and check it out?

  But she’d retreated here in the first place precisely so that she could avoid doing that. Her conversation with Ross spooled out through her mind again. And remembering the words they’d used, she saw that they’d both got it wrong. She finally saw the truth of it.

  They’d used words like ‘duty,’ ‘obligation.’ Doing things because you ought to. Doing things because you could. But that was not why she’d been battling evil forces this whole while.

  The real reason washed through her like a mountain stream, a startling revelation that flushed all the other junk away.

  She hadn’t been doing this because she ought to. Nor even because she really wanted to.

  It was because she had to, needed to. It was the only way to fill the hollow that had been left in her soul when her family had vanished. Saving someone, anyone … it seemed to soothe her just a little. Because the plain truth was, she blamed herself for what had happened to her kids. She had brought Tom Larson home. Encouraged him to move in, and do anything he liked.

  Maybe it was high time she stopped beating herself up about it.

  The glow up ahead of her was still a good dealer dimmer than it should have been. Her hands unclenched a little and her index fingers twitched. She wondered what was going on out there. Ross hadn’t mentioned anything like this.

  Cass jerked back the next instant, badly startled, and with good reason. A pair of eyes had suddenly appeared before her. Maybe she was imagining that, since they were floating in the air all by themselves. There was no hint of a face surrounding them, nor anybody holding them up.

  Her hands moved for her knife, then stopped, realizing this wasn’t any supernatural enemy. Because when the eyes blinked at her, there was a burning redness in their pupils.

  There was only one person she knew of who had that. And so she recognized that this was Lehman Willets.

  Under normal circumstances, she’d be afraid of the man, horrified that he’d approached her. It was the same way for the entire town, Ross being the only real exception. Everyone knew what his history was, his lapse into megalomania and the innocents he’d killed.

  But his unannounced appearance this way, like some weirdly reversed Cheshire Cat -- it was so bizarre that her normal reactions didn’t kick in. She simply froze, then blinked back at him.

  There was no mouth in view, no lips or tongue. But regardless of that, his gruff voice drifted to her from the ether.

  “Ross needs you, really badly. There’s a lot of townspeople in trouble.”

  The doctor paused, then added, “And it’s families, Cassandra.”

  Then he opened up a window in her mind, and showed her what was happening on the darkened edge of Tyburn.

  CHAPTER 21

  Both angels appeared from the same intersection as the smaller creatures had. They’d apparently been following along behind them. As we watched, they started to draw closer. There was nothing hurried or urgent about the way they moved. That bothered me more than a sudden rush would have. They came sailing in our direction like two vast pieces of dandelion snow caught on a vagrant wind, like they had all the time in creation.

  Was it just that they had been around so long? Or were they confident that nothing could oppose them?

  They seemed to be glowing a few degrees brighter than the last time I’d encountered them. That put me in mind of what Willets had said, about them gaining strength the longer they were here. But there was still no warmth to the way they shone. Their light was cold as a crescent moon’s on a very frosty winter night. Their shifting wings and lean, gnarled faces glowed with real intensity, but it was almost wholly self-contained.

  “Ross?” I heard Ritchie blurt.

  I remembered this was his first look at these things. He’d seen the humans who’d been changed, but had not met their makers. And Vallencourt’s not easy to shake, but even he looked worried.

  I flicked my gaze across the barrier, wondering if it would hold. The closer they got, the more I doubted it. They could obviously see it, but they were not slowing down. And if they managed to break through …

  Then matters got a whole lot worse. Dozens more of those dark, scuttling shapes, then hundreds of them, were appearing on the street behind the glowing figures. Like the angels were Pied Pipers, leading a whole troop of man-sized rats.

  That forced me to a decision. And the first order of business was, the family we’d helped was still in danger.

  “Get them out of here!” I shouted.

  Vallencourt’s expression froze. “How about you?”

  “I can take care of myself. Get them out of harm’s way, now!”

  The look in his eyes went a little cooler, seeing I was right. These were ordinary citizens -- their safety was his main concern. He pulled open the doors of his classic old Camaro and they didn’t even hesitate. They piled in. It was a hell of a squeeze, all five of them in a sports model. But the kids fitted in the narrow backseat. And then the orange car was wheeling around and screaming away, leaving the smell of rubber in its wake.

  I watched that with relief. But staying here made no sense in the least. There was nothing I could do against these creatures on my own. And so I got into my Cadillac and took it a distance off down Greenwood Terrace before performing a U-turn and stopping again.

  I peered through the glass, watching events unfold. Uncomfortably aware that I had done the same thing last time.

  Both angels drifted right up to the broad translucent wall. You couldn’t see how high it went -- it simply bled off into the upper darkness. From this distance they were reduced to bright specks, which didn’t mean I couldn�
��t see them clearly. They paused behind it, hovering weightlessly. A great cluster of hunched shapes gathered up behind them. ‘Hominids’ … the word came to me. Creatures that looked vaguely human, but were not.

  The angel on the right started to sail forward again. The barrier bulged around it, the exact same way a bubble might.

  And then, without anymore fanfare, it broke. I think I hit the dashboard with my knuckles at that point.

  The whole shimmering surface faded, disappeared. As quickly and easily as that. I’d expected it to slow them down for at least a little while, but it hadn’t even done that. The product of the adepts’ combined power, and it was next to useless against these things.

  I was sucking in uneasy breaths. What would they do beyond this point?

  Once they were through, the bright figures paused. They didn’t come out onto the main street, but halted right on the shadowy edge of Tyburn. Sycamore Hill’s magic hadn’t halted them. But something else was doing so.

  I figured what it was. Back the way they’d come, the avenues were murky, not the smallest gleam from any source. Whereas the neighborhood ahead of them was still well lit. The streetlamps were on, especially on Greenwood Terrace, which shone like a strip of neon through the darkest hours of the night. In addition to which, most people were at home and had their lights turned on, as they had been advised. It was practically as bright as day out in the streets surrounding Tyburn.

  Willets had been right. It was the angels’ one real weakness. And I felt relieved a second time.

  Then that began evaporating like a mist. Because the hominids started spilling out across the open highway.

  They didn’t seem to like their new environment anymore than their creators. Were hunched even lower, tucking their heads down. But they kept on going. And I thought at first that they were heading for the populated houses. But it turned out that was not their goal.

  They streamed in the direction of a couple of tall posts at the corner of Greenwood and Canterbury. And I immediately saw what they were after. There were power lines suspended up there, stretching out across a good deal of this district.