by Susan Ee
That's the best we can do in the food department, but we do find supplies in the garage. A backpack that doubles as a duffle bag, which is great since he can't carry a backpack right now but might be able to later. A couple of boys' sleeping bags all rolled and ready to go. No tent, but there are flashlights with extra batteries. A slick camp knife that's more expensive than any I've ever managed to buy. I give mine to Raffe and keep this one for myself.
Since my clothes are dirty, I simply trade them in for clean ones from the closets. We also liberate some extra clothes and jackets. I find a sweatshirt that comes close to fitting Raffe. I also make him change from his tell-tale black pants and laced boots to jeans and ordinary hiking boots.
Luckily, there are three bedrooms stocked with various sizes of men's clothing. There must have been a family with two teen boys here once, but the only sign of them now is what's in the closets and garage. The fit of Raffe's hiking boots are what concern me the most. His blisters are already healed from yesterday, but even with his super-healing, we can't have him tearing up his feet every day.
I tell myself I care because I can't have him holding me back by limping and refuse to think further than that.
“You look almost human dressed like that,” I say.
Actually, he looks exactly like a gorgeous Olympian champion. It's more than a little disturbing just how much he looks like a supreme example of a human being. I mean, shouldn't an angel that's part of a legion to eradicate humanity look, well, evil and alien?
“So long as you don't bleed in the shape of wing joints, you should pass for human. Oh, and don't let anyone pick you up. They'll know you're not right as soon as they feel how light you are.”
“I'll be sure not to let anyone but you carry me in her arms.” He turns and leaves the kitchen before I can figure out what to make of his comment. A sense of humor is one more thing I don’t think angels should have. The fact that his sense of humor is corny makes it even more wrong.
~
It's noon by the time we leave the big house. We're in a little cul-de-sac off Page Mill Road. The road is dark and slick with last night’s downpour. The sky is heavy with broken gray clouds, but if we're lucky, we should be in the hills under a warm roof by the time the rains start again.
Our packs sit on Paige’s chair, and if I close my eyes, I can almost pretend it’s her I’m pushing. I catch myself humming what I thought was a meaningless tune. I stop when I realize it’s my mother’s apology song.
I put one foot in front of the other, trying to ignore the too-light weight of the wheelchair and the wingless angel beside me.
There are a lot of cars strewn on the road until we hit the freeway entrance. Here, there are only a couple of cars pointed up the hill. Everyone tried to get on the freeway to get away in the early days. I’m not sure where they were going. I guess they weren’t either since the freeway is clogged in both directions.
It’s not long before we see the first body.
CHAPTER 12
A family lying in a pool of blood.
A man, a woman, a girl about ten years old. The child is at the edge of the woods while the adults are in the middle of the road. Either the kid ran for it when the parents were attacked, or she hid during the attack and was caught when she came out.
They haven’t been dead for long. I know because the blood on their tattered clothes is still bright red. I have to swallow and fight to keep the cat food in my stomach.
Their heads are intact. Thankfully, the girl's hair has been blown over her face. Their bodies, though, are in bad shape. For one thing, parts of their torso have been chewed down to the bones with bits of flesh still stuck to it. For another, a few arms and legs are missing. I don't have the guts to take a closer look but Raffe does.
“Teeth marks,” he says as he kneels on the asphalt in front of the man’s body.
“What kind of animal are we talking about?”
He sits crouched near the bodies, considering my question. “The kind with two legs and flat teeth.”
My stomach roils. “What are you saying? That they’re human?”
“Maybe. Unusually sharp, but human-shaped.”
“Can’t be.” But I know it can. Humans will do what is needed to survive. Still, it doesn’t add up. “This is too wasteful. If you’re desperate enough to cannibalize, you wouldn’t just take a few bites and leave.” But these bodies have more than a few bites taken out of them. Now that I make myself really look, I can see they are half eaten. Still, why leave half behind?
Raffe peers at the place where the kid's leg should be. “The limbs have been ripped right out of their sockets.”
“Enough,” I say as I take two steps back. I scan our surroundings. We’re in an open field, and I feel as nervous as a field mouse looking at a sky full of hawks.
“Well,” he says as he gets up, scanning the trees. “Let's hope whoever did this is still in control of this area.”
“Why?”
“Because they won't be hungry.”
That doesn’t make me feel better. “You're pretty sick, you know that?”
“Me? It isn't my people who did this.”
“How do you know? You have the same teeth we do.”
“But my people aren’t desperate.” He says this as if the angels had nothing to do with us being desperate. “Nor are they insane.”
That's when I see the broken egg.
It lies on the side of the road near the kid, the yolk brown and the egg white congealed. The stench of sulfur hits my nose. It's the familiar reek that infused my clothes, pillow and hair for the last two years throughout Mom’s rotten egg kick. Beside it, there is a small bouquet of wild sprigs. Rosemary and sage. Either my mother thought they were pretty, or her insanity has taken on a very dark sense of humor.
It doesn't mean anything other than she was here. That's all. She couldn't take on an entire family.
But she could overtake a ten-year-old coming back from her hiding place after her parents were killed.
She was here and walked by the bodies, just as we are doing. That's all.
Really, that's all.
“Penryn?”
I realize Raffe's been talking to me.
“What?”
“Could they be kids?”
“Could what be kids?”
“The attackers,” he says slowly. Obviously, I’ve missed a piece of the conversation. “As I’ve said, the bite marks seem too small to be adults.”
“They must be animals.”
“Animals with flat teeth?”
“Yes,” I say with more conviction than I feel. “That makes more sense than a kid taking down an entire family.”
“But not more sense than a gang of feral children attacking them.” I try to shoot him a look that says he’s crazy, but I suspect I only succeed in looking scared. My brain buzzes with images of what might have happened here.
He says something about avoiding the road and heading uphill through the forest. I nod without really hearing the details and follow him into the trees.
CHAPTER 13
We mostly have evergreens in California, but there’s enough fall foliage that covers the forest. We can’t help but crunch at every step. I don’t know about other parts of the world, but at least in our hills, I’m convinced that the whole story of skilled woodsmen walking silently through the woods is a myth. For one thing, there’s simply no place to walk during autumn where you can avoid the fallen leaves. For another, even the squirrels and deer, birds and lizards make enough noise in these hills to make them seem like much larger animals.
The good news is that the rains drenched the leaves, which dampens the sound. The bad news is that I can’t navigate the wheelchair on the wet hillside.
Dead leaves get trapped in the spokes as I struggle to force it forward. To lighten the load, I strap the sword onto my pack and carry them on my back. I throw the other pack to Raffe to carry. Still the chair skids and slips on the wet leaves, cons
tantly heading downhill as I struggle to roll it crosswise. Our progress slows to a crawl. Raffe offers no help but neither does he offer sarcastic suggestions.
We eventually pick out a clear path that seems to go in the general direction we want to head. The ground is mostly level on the trail and there is far less foliage on it. But the rains have turned the dirt trail into a mud bath. I don’t know how well the chair will work in the mud, and I’d rather keep it running in smooth condition. So I fold the chair and carry it. That works for awhile, in an uncomfortable, awkward way. The most I’ve ever carried the chair before was a flight or two of stairs.
It becomes obvious very quickly that I won’t be able to continue to hike carrying a wheelchair. Even if Raffe offered to help—which he doesn’t—we wouldn’t make it very far lugging an awkward metal and plastic contraption.
I finally unfold it and set it down. It sinks in, the mud greedily sucking at the wheels. It only takes a few feet for the chair to get completely clumped in mud to the point where the wheels freeze.
I grab a stick and knock off as much of it as I can. I have to do that a couple more times. Each time, the mud clumps faster on the wheels. Once churned, it’s more like clay than mud. Finally, it only takes a couple of spins of the wheels before the chair is good and stuck.
I stand beside it, tears stinging my eyes. How can I rescue Paige without her chair?
I’ll have to figure something out, even if I have to carry her. The important thing is that I find her. Still, I stand there for another minute, my head bowed in defeat.
“You still have her chocolate,” says Raffe, his voice not ungentle. “The rest is just logistics.”
I don’t lift my eyes to look at him because the tears haven’t gone away yet. I brush my fingers along the leather seat in goodbye as I walk away from Paige’s chair.
~
We walk for about an hour before Raffe whispers, “Does moping actually help humans feel better?” We’ve been whispering since we saw the victims on the road.
“I’m not moping,” I whisper back.
“Of course you’re not. A girl like you, spending time with a warrior demigod like me. What’s to mope about? Leaving a wheelchair behind couldn’t possibly show up on the radar compared to that.”
I nearly stumble over a fallen branch. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I never kid about my warrior demigod status.”
“Oh. My. God.” I lower my voice, having forgotten to whisper. “You are nothing but a bird with an attitude. Okay, so you have a few muscles, I’ll grant you that. But you know, a bird is nothing but a barely evolved lizard. That’s what you are.”
He chuckles. “Evolution.” He leans over as if telling me a secret. “I’ll have you know that I’ve been this perfect since the beginning of time.” He is so close that his breath caresses my ear.
“Oh, please. Your giant head is getting too big for this forest. Pretty soon, you’re going to get stuck trying to walk between two trees. And then, I’ll have to rescue you.” I give him a weary look. “Again.”
I pick up my pace, trying to discourage the smart comeback that I’m sure will come.
But it doesn’t. Could he be letting me have the last say?
When I look back, Raffe has a smug grin on his face. That’s when I realize I’ve been manipulated into feeling better. I stubbornly try to resist but it’s already too late.
I do feel a little better.
~
From the map, I remember that Skyline Blvd. is an artery that runs through the woods into South San Francisco or thereabouts. Skyline is uphill from where we are. Although Raffe hasn’t said where the aerie is located, he’s told me we need to head north. That means going through San Francisco. So if we just head uphill, then follow Skyline into the city, we could stay out of highly populated areas until we can no longer avoid it.
I have a lot of questions for Raffe now that I’ve realized I should collect as much knowledge of angels as possible. But cannibals take precedence, and we keep our conversation to a whispered minimum.
I thought that it could take all day for us to get to Skyline but we reach it by mid-afternoon. Good thing, too, because I don’t think I can handle another meal of cat food. We have plenty of time to rummage through the houses on Skyline for dinner before it gets dark. These houses are nowhere near as close to each other as houses in the suburbs, but they are still regularly spaced along the road. Most of them are hidden behind redwood trees, which is great for surreptitious supply searching.
I wonder how long we should wait for my mother and how we’ll ever find her again. She knew to come up to the hills, but we had no plans beyond that. Like everything else in life right now, all I can do is hope for the best.
Skyline is a beautiful road along the hilltop of the mountain range that divides Silicon Valley from the ocean. It’s a two-lane highway that gives glimpses of both the valley on one side and the ocean on the other. It’s the only road I’ve walked on since the attacks that doesn’t feel wrong in its deserted state. Flanked by redwoods and smelling of eucalyptus, this road would feel more wrong with traffic on it.
Not long after we reach Skyline, though, we see cars piled up crosswise on the road, blocking any potential traffic. This is obviously not something that happened by accident. The cars are angled ninety degrees to the road and staggered for several car lengths, just in case someone decides to crash through them, I suppose. There is a community here, and it does not welcome strangers.
The angel who now looks human takes in the site. He angles his head like a dog that hears something in the distance. He nods his chin slightly, ahead and to the left of the road.
“They’re over there, watching us,” he whispers.
All I can see is an empty road running through redwoods. “How can you tell?”
“I hear them.”
“How far?” I whisper. How far are they, and how far can you hear?
He looks at me as though knowing what I’m thinking. He can’t read minds as well as have amazing hearing, can he? He shrugs, then turns to head back into the cover of the trees.
As an experiment, I call him all kinds of names in my head. When he doesn’t respond, I come up with random images in my head to see if I can get him to give me a funny look. Somehow, my thoughts drift to how he held me during the night, when I dreamt I was freezing in the water. My imagination has me waking up on that couch and turning to face him. Somehow I’m wearing only my…
I stop. I think about bananas, oranges, and strawberries, mortified that he might actually sense what I am thinking. But he continues through the forest, giving no sign that he can read my mind. That’s the good news. The bad news is he doesn’t know what they are thinking either. Unlike him, I don’t hear, see, or smell anything that might indicate that anyone is out to ambush us.
“What did you hear?” I whisper.
He turns around and whispers back. “Two people whispering.”
After that, I keep my mouth shut and just follow him.
The woods up here are all redwoods. There are no leaves on the forest floor to crunch as we walk. Instead, the forest gives us exactly what we need—a thick carpet of soft needles that muffles our footsteps.
I want to ask if the voices he heard are coming our way, but am afraid to speak unnecessarily. We can try to go around their territory, but we need to continue in the same general direction if we are to reach San Francisco.
Raffe picks up his pace downhill almost to a run. I follow blindly, assuming he hears something I don’t. Then I hear it too.
Dogs.
By the sound of their barking, they’re heading straight for us.
CHAPTER 14
We break into a sprint, skidding on the needles almost as much as running over them. Could these people keep dogs? Or is this a wild pack? If they’re wild, then climbing up a tree would keep us safe until they wander away. But if they’re kept…. The thought boggles my mind. They would need enough food to ke
ep themselves and their dogs fed. Who has that kind of wealth and how did they get it?
An image of the cannibalized family comes back to me, and my brain shuts off while my instincts take over.
It’s clear by the sound of the dogs that they’re gaining on us. The road is far behind us now so we can’t dive into a car. A tree will have to do.
I frantically scan the forest for a climbable tree. There are none that I can see. Unlike other trees, redwood trunks don’t split off. They grow tall and straight, with branches shooting out perpendicular to the trunk high above the ground. I'd have to be at least double my height to reach the lowest branch of any of the trees around us.
Raffe jumps up below a branch. Although he jumps much higher than a normal man could, it is still not enough. He slams his fist into the trunk in frustration. He's probably never needed to jump before. Why jump when you can fly?
“Get on my shoulders,” he says.
I'm not sure what his plan is, but the dogs are getting louder. I can't tell how many of them there are, but it's not one or two, it's a pack.
He grabs my waist and lifts me up. He's strong. Strong enough to lift me all the way up until I'm standing on his shoulders. I can barely reach the lowest branch this way, but it's enough to get a grip when I push off from him. I hope the skinny branch is strong enough to hold my weight.
He puts his hands below my feet, supporting and pushing me up until I'm securely on the branch. It wobbles but holds my weight. I look around to see if I can find a branch to break and send down to him.
But before I can do anything, he takes off running. I almost call out his name, but catch myself before I do. The last thing we need is me giving away our position.
I watch him disappear down the hill. Now it's my turn to pound on the tree in frustration. What's he doing? If he stayed by the tree, maybe I could have managed to get him up here somehow. I could have at least helped him fight off the dogs by throwing things down on them. I have no projectile weapons but from this height, anything I throw would be a weapon.
