by Susan Ee
Raffe stops in front of me. I follow his lead and hold my breath. Then I hear it.
Someone is crying. It’s not the brokenhearted wail of someone who’s just lost a family member. I’ve heard plenty of those in the last few weeks to know what they sound like. There is no shock or denial in the sound, just pure grief and the pain of accepting it as a lifelong companion.
Raffe and I exchange glances. Which is safer? Go up to the road to avoid the griever? Or stay in the forest and risk an encounter with him? Probably the latter. Raffe must think so too, because he turns and continues in the forest.
It’s not long before we see the little girls.
They hang from a tree. Not by their necks, but by ropes tied under their arms and around their chests.
One girl looks to be about Paige’s age and the other a couple of years older. That would make them seven and nine. The older girl’s hand still grips the younger girl’s dress like she had tried to hold the little girl up out of harm’s way.
They wear what look like matching striped dresses. It’s hard to tell now that the print is stained in blood. Most of the material has been ripped and shredded. Whatever gnawed on their legs and torso got full before it reached their chests. Or it was too low to the ground to reach them.
The worst by far are their tortured expressions. They were alive when they were eaten.
I double over and throw up kibble bits until I dry-heave.
All the while, a middle-aged man wearing thick glasses cries beneath the girls. He’s a scrawny guy, with the kind of look and presence that must have had him sitting alone in the cafeteria through his high school years. His entire body trembles with his sobs. A woman with red-rimmed eyes wraps her arms around him.
“It was an accident,” says the woman, soothing her hand over the man’s back.
“This was no accident,” says the man.
“We didn’t mean to.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“Of course it’s not okay,” she says. “But we’ll get through this. All of us.”
“Who’s worse? Him or us?”
“It’s not his fault,” she says. “He can’t help it. He’s the victim, not the monster.”
“We need to put him down,” he says. Another sob escapes him.
“You’d give up on him just like that?” Her expression turns fierce. She steps back from him.
He looks even more forlorn now that he’s unable to lean on her. But anger stiffens his spine. He flings his arm toward the hanging girls. “We fed him little girls!”
“He’s just sick, that’s all,” she says. “We just need to make him better.”
“How?” He hunches to look intensely into her face. “What are we going to do, take him to the hospital?”
She puts her hands on his face. “When we get him back, we’ll know what to do. Trust me.”
He turns from her. “We’ve gone too far. He’s not our boy anymore. He’s a monster. We’ve all become monsters.”
She cocks back her hand and slaps him. The crack of her palm against his cheek is as startling as a gunshot.
They continue to argue, completely ignoring us as if any danger we might pose is so irrelevant compared to what they’re dealing with that it’s not worth their energy to notice us. I’m not sure what they’re saying exactly, but dark suspicions edge my mind.
Raffe grabs my elbow and leads me downhill, around the mad people who ignore us and the half-chewed girls hanging grotesquely from the tree.
The acid in my stomach churns and threatens to come up again. But I swallow hard and force my feet to follow him.
I keep my gaze on the ground at Raffe’s feet, trying not to think about what’s just uphill from us. I catch a faint odor that clenches my stomach in a familiar way. I look around, trying to pinpoint the scent. It’s the sulfurous stench of rotten eggs. My nose leads me to a pair of eggs nestled in the dead leaves. They’re cracked in several places where I can catch a glimpse of the brown yolk inside. The stain of faded pink still shows on the delicate eggshell where someone had dyed it long ago.
I look uphill. From here, I have a perfect view of the hanging girls between the trees.
Whether my mother placed the eggs here as a protective talisman for us, or whether she is playing out the type of fantasy the old media would have headlined, “The Devil Made Me Do It,” I’ll never know. Both are equally possible now that she is completely off her meds.
My stomach cramps and I have to double over again to dry-heave.
A warm hand touches my shoulder, and a water bottle is thrust in front of me. I take a swig, swish it around, then spit it out. The water lands on the eggs, tilting them with the force of my ejection. One egg oozes dark yolk down its side like old blood. The other wobbles unevenly down the hill until it rests safely against a tree root, its pink tint darkened by wetness, like the flush of guilt.
A warm arm circles my shoulder and helps me stand up. “Come on,” says Raffe. “Let’s go.”
We walk away from the damaged eggs and the hanging girls.
I lean into his strength until I realize what I’m doing. I pull back abruptly. I don’t have the luxury of leaning on anyone’s strength, least of all an angel’s.
My shoulder feels cold and vulnerable once his warmth is gone.
I bite the inside of my cheek to give myself something more demanding to feel.
CHAPTER 25
“What do you think they were doing?” I ask.
Raffe shrugs.
“Do you think they were feeding the low demons?”
“Maybe.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I’ve given up trying to make sense of humans.”
“We're not all like that, you know,” I say. I don't know why I feel I have to justify what we're like to an angel.
He just gives me a knowing look and keeps walking.
“If you ever saw us before the attack, you'd know,” I say stubbornly.
“I know,” he says, not even looking at me.
“How do you know?”
“I watched TV.”
I snort a laugh. Then I realize he's not joking. “For real?”
“Doesn't everybody?”
I guess everybody did. It was on the air for free. All they had to do was catch the signal and they’d know all about us. TV wasn’t exactly a manifesto of reality either, but it did reflect our greatest hopes and worst fears. I wonder how angels think of us, if they think of us at all.
I wonder what Raffe does in his spare time, other than watch TV. It’s hard to imagine him sitting down on his couch after a rough day at war, watching TV shows about humans to wind down. What’s his domestic life like?
“Are you married?” I instantly regret asking this question as it conjures up an image of him with a painfully beautiful angel wife with little cherubs running around some estate with Grecian pillars.
He pauses in his trek and glares at me as if I just said something totally inappropriate.
“Don't let my appearance fool you, Penryn. I am not human. The Daughters of Men are forbidden to Angels.”
“What about Daughters of Women?” I attempt a cheeky smile but it falls flat.
“This is serious business. Don’t you know your religious history?”
Most of what I know about religion is through my mother. I think about all the times she raved in tongues in the middle of the night in my room. She came in so often while I slept that I’d gotten into the habit of sleeping with my back to the wall so I could see her coming in without her knowing I was awake.
She’d sit on the floor beside my bed, rock back and forth in a trancelike state, gripping her Bible and speaking in tongues for hours. The nonsensical, guttural noises had the cadence of an angry chant. Or a curse.
Really creepy stuff while you’re lying in the dark, mostly asleep. That’s about the extent of my religious education.
“Uh, no,” I say. “Can’t say I know much about religious hist
ory.”
He begins walking again. “A group of angels called the Watchers were stationed on Earth to observe the humans. Over time, they got lonely and took human wives, knowing they shouldn’t. Their children were called Nephilim. And they were abominations. They fed on humans, drank their blood and terrorized the Earth. For that, the Watchers were condemned to the Pit until Judgment Day.”
He takes several steps in silence as if wondering whether to tell me more. I wait, hoping to hear as much as I can about the world of angels, even if it’s ancient history.
The silence is heavy. There’s more to this story than he’s telling me.
“So,” I prod. “The long and short of it is that angels aren’t allowed to get together with humans? Otherwise, they’re damned?”
“Very.”
“That’s harsh.” I’m surprised I can feel any sympathy for angels, even ones in ancient stories.
“You think that’s bad, you should have seen the punishment for their wives.”
It’s almost as if he’s inviting me to ask. Here’s my chance to find out more. But I find that I don’t really want to know the punishment for falling in love with an angel. Instead, I watch the dried needles crunch under my feet as we walk.
~
Skyline Blvd. abruptly ends at Highway 92, and we follow Highway 280 north into the once highly-populated area just south of San Francisco. 280 is a main artery into San Francisco, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear an actual working truck on the road below us. But it is.
It's been almost a month since I heard a moving car. There are plenty of cars that work, plenty of gas, but I hadn't realized there were any clear roads left anymore. We crouch down in the shrubs and scan the road. The wind cuts through my sweatshirt and teases hair strands loose from my ponytail.
Below us, a black Hummer weaves in and out, following a path that's been cleared between the jammed cars. It stops and idles for awhile. If it turned off its engine, you'd never know that it was any different from the thousands of other cars abandoned on the streets. When it was moving, I could see the path of cleared cars that it followed. But now, I see that the path cleverly winds and even backtracks to hide the fact that it is a path.
Now that the Hummer has stopped, the path is blocked, and it would be very tough to see the trail at all unless you knew about it. The Hummer is just one in a sea of empty cars, the path just a random pattern of gaps among an infinite maze. From the ground, you could probably see the driver and passengers in the Hummer, but from the air, you'd never know. These guys are camouflaging themselves against the angels.
“Obi's men,” Raffe says, coming to the same conclusion I have. “Clever,” he says with some respect in his voice.
It is clever. The roads are the most direct way to get anywhere. The Hummer cuts its engine, and it effectively disappears into the scene. A moment later, Raffe points up. Tiny specs mar the otherwise clear sky. The specs move fast and quickly turn into a squad of angels flying in a V formation. They sweep low over the freeway as if searching for prey.
I hold my breath and crouch as low as I can in the brush, wondering whether Raffe will call out for their attention. It hits me again just how little I know about angels. I can't even guess as to whether Raffe wants this new group's attention. How can he tell if they're hostile?
If I did manage to infiltrate the angels' lair, how will I find the ones who took Paige? If I knew something about them, like their names, or unit identification, I'd have a start. Without realizing it, I had made the assumption that the angels are a small community, one maybe a bit larger than Obi's camp. I had vaguely imagined that so long as I could find the aerie, I could observe and figure out what to do from there.
For the first time, it occurs to me that it could be much bigger than that. Big enough for Raffe not to be able to identify whether these angels are his friend or foe. Big enough for them to have deadly factions within their ranks. If I were to walk into a camp the size of a Roman invading army, could I just figure out on the spot where they kept Paige and simply walk out with her?
Beside me, Raffe's muscles loosen and he deflates into the ground. He's decided not to try to get the angels' attention. I don't know if this means he's identified them as hostile, or if he just couldn't identify them at all.
Either way, it tells me that his angel enemies are more threatening than the risks he takes on the ground. If he could find friendly angels, they could carry him to wherever he needs to go, and he could get medical attention that much sooner. So the threat must be severe for him to pass up that chance.
The angels turn and swing by past the sea of cars again, as though to sniff the air for prey.
I can barely find the Hummer again even though I saw where they stopped. Obi's men know their camouflage all right.
I wonder what’s their mission that makes them risk getting caught on the road? It can’t be us. We're not worth the risk, at least, not that they know. So they must think there's something important near or in the city. Maybe recon?
Whatever it is the angels are looking for, they don't find it. They swoop up and disappear into the horizon. The air rushing past their ears as they fly must dull their hearing. Maybe that's why it has to be so good to begin with.
I let out a deep breath. The Hummer below finally restarts its engine and resumes winding its way north toward the city.
“How did they know the angels were coming?” he asks, almost to himself.
I shrug. I could make some random guesses, but I don't see any reason to share them with him. We’re smart monkeys, especially where survival is concerned. And Silicon Valley has some of the smartest, most innovative monkeys in the world. Even though I escaped Obi's camp, I feel a pang of pride at what our side might be doing.
Raffe watches me carefully, and I wonder how much of what I'm thinking is on my face.
“Why didn’t you call out to them?” I ask.
It's his turn to shrug.
“You could be getting medical assistance by sunset,” I say.
He pushes himself off the ground and brushes off. “Yes. Or I could be delivering myself back into the hands of my enemies.”
He starts walking roughly in the same direction as the road again. I follow on his heels.
“Did you recognize them?” I try to keep my tone casual. I wish I could just ask him directly how many of them there are, but that's not a question he could answer without betraying military secrets.
He shakes his head but doesn't elaborate.
“No, you didn’t recognize who they were? Or no, you couldn't see them well enough to recognize them?”
He pauses to dig the remaining cat food out of his pack. “Here. Please stuff this in your mouth. You can have my share.”
So much for my information mining. I guess I’ll never be a spymaster like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
CHAPTER 26
“Can you drive one of those things?” he asks, pointing to the road.
“Yeah,” I say slowly.
“Let's go.” He turns downhill toward the road.
“Um, won't that be dangerous?”
“It's unlikely there will be two units flying in the same direction within an hour or two of each other. Once we're on the road, we'll be safer from the road monkeys. They'll think we're Obi's people, too well armed and too well fed to attack.”
“We’re not monkeys.” Hadn't I just thought we were clever monkeys? So why does it sting that he just called me one?
He ignores me and keeps walking.
What did I expect? An apology? I let it drop and follow him down to the freeway.
As soon as we step onto the asphalt, Raffe grabs my arm and ducks behind a van. I crouch beside him, straining to hear what he hears. After a minute, I hear a car coming toward us. Another one? What’s the chance of another car just happening to be on the same road only ten minutes behind the first car?
This one is a black truck with a canopy over the bed. Whatever is under there is big, lumpy
, and somehow intimidating. It looks a lot like the truck they were filling with explosives yesterday. It rumbles by, slow and full of purpose towards the city.
A caravan. It’s a very spread out caravan, but I’d bet the contents of my pack that there are more cars ahead and behind. They’ve spread it out to be less noticeable. The Hummer probably knew about the angels flying toward them because they got word from the cars ahead of them. Even if the first car was taken out, the rest of the caravan would be all right. My respect for Obi’s group goes up another notch.
When the sound of the engine fades, we get up from our crouch behind the van and start looking for our own ride. I'd prefer to drive a low-profile, economy car that won't make much noise and won't run out of gas. But that's the last car Obi's men would drive, so we start looking at the large selection of beefy SUVs on the road.
Most of the cars don't have their keys in them. Even at the end of the world when a box of crackers is worth more than a Mercedes, people still took their keys with them when they abandoned their cars. Habit, I suppose.
After looking at half a dozen, we find a black SUV with tinted windows with the keys on the driver's seat. This driver must have pulled the keys out of habit, then thought better of dragging the worthless metal with him on the road. It has a quarter tank of gas. That should at least get us into San Francisco, assuming the road is clear that far. It’s not enough to get us back though.
Back? Back where?
I quiet the voice in my head and climb in. Raffe climbs in the passenger seat. It starts on the first try and we begin weaving up 280 north.
I never thought moving 20 miles per hour could be so exciting. My heart pounds as I grip the steering wheel like it's going to fly out of control any second now. I can't watch all the obstacles on the road and still be on the lookout for attackers. I throw a quick glance at Raffe. He’s scanning the surroundings, including the side mirrors, and I relax a little.
