Kill All Angels

by Robert Brockway

  Huh. Okay, let’s try another tack.

  I thought about it spinning, and it spun.

  Cool.

  I thought about it getting closer, and it did. I focused in on the bottom layer, and it burst out of the cube, expanding until the non-place around me filled with stars, nebula, and planets. A thick cloud of brown dust swooped toward me. I tried to shield myself by reflex, but there was no point. I wasn’t here. My viewpoint swirled about in its depths, turning listlessly, and then it was gone. The cloud vanished into the distance. As it pulled away, I could see that the dust wasn’t entirely brown—when far enough removed, it took on colors and made patterns. Sweeping orange melted into dull crimson faded into dark purple. Stars engulfed me, burning the air beside me one second, then shrinking away until they were just pinpricks of light.

  Oof. Enough of that.

  It wasn’t vertigo, exactly, but the rapid sense of expansion left me feeling shaky and fragile. I focused on pulling the universe back together. It shrank, compacted into a shimmering plane, and slotted itself into the cube. Another layer began to pull out from the mass, but I mentally pushed it back in.

  I didn’t need another demonstration. I got the message: Each of these thin cross-sections was a universe, carefully fit together to form a whole of something else: the cube.

  Okay, so … what’s the point?

  One by one, tiny pins of light stabbed through the bottommost layer of the cube. They were cold and featureless. I heard the dull roar of static when I focused in on one.

  These were the angels I had seen earlier.

  The next highest layer lit up: a pattern of angels almost, but not quite identical to those below it. And the next, and so on. Each layer’s layout of angels slightly different than the one below, slowly forming a three-dimensional pattern. Taken alone, in the seemingly flat planes, the angels were just isolated balls of light. When taken altogether, each layer building upon the other, another picture became clear: Sprawled throughout the universal cube was a mass of slowly writhing tentacles, made of pure, white, screaming light. An infinity of angels, each a separate being in their own universe, linked together throughout dimensions into a single, massive creature.

  A word popped into my mind: “Siphonophora.” I’d learned it on a fifth-grade field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

  “Who knows what this is?” the man with the big calves and the ponytail asked us.

  A bunch of kids yelled out “jellyfish!”

  Ponytail laughed.

  “You’d think that, but no! This is a Portuguese man o’ war, and it’s not actually a jellyfish, but something we call a siphonophore.” He gestured toward the tank, and we all dutifully peered into the scratched glass to watch the gelatinous stringy blob undulate through the blue. “That means it’s not one big creature, but many smaller ones joined together into a single community that works together so closely, they can’t even live apart!”

  I just nodded and let the information immediately slip out of my little kid brain. I wanted to see the otters. I could give a damn about jellyfish—unless they had little whiskers and held hands so they didn’t drift apart while they slept, jellyfish had nothing on otters. But all the information came flooding back now, looking at the disembodied spray of white tubes inhabiting the universal cube.

  Not inhabiting. Infecting.

  They were my thoughts, but they felt forced. Just like the Siphonophora memory, come to think of it. I’m the one thinking these things, but not the one telling me to think them.

  This wasn’t a random happening. This was a presentation.

  Something was showing this to me. I became aware of a presence out here with me in the non-space. Nothing visible or substantial, but I could still feel its bulk. Or weight, or … I don’t know. I only knew that it was indefinably, immeasurably vast. I felt like krill, drifting in the ocean, waiting for a whale to come by and feed.

  Infected, came the thought again.

  It was true: The siphonophore wasn’t just living in the cube, like a goldfish in a bowl. It was spreading through it. Where the tentacles of light passed through, the cube became wan and still. The siphonophore was careful not to occupy one space for too long, or return to it too frequently, giving the cube just enough time to regenerate before sucking the life out of it again. It wasn’t a natural inhabitant of the universal collective. It was a parasite. A colony that passed through every observable dimension, each single creature linking the energy it stole to the others.

  If I had a body to shiver, I would have.

  It was bad enough, thinking the angels were some race of otherworldly beings with evil intent. I, perhaps arrogantly, felt I could fight that somehow—but this? A whole universe is small to this thing. It spans every possible reality, twisting through the very core of existence. What could I do to this? Kill one angel—kill a thousand, a million—it wouldn’t even register to the whole. I’m nothing against this. I’m helpless.

  The link is not just their strength, it’s also their weakness.

  That thing again, thinking my thoughts for me.

  What are you?

  No response. Just that mental image of the whale again, drifting in space—slow, oblivious, eternal.

  Why are you out here?

  I felt the presence shift. It drew closer to the cube, and the siphonophore flared an angry, bare-bulb white.

  Pain. Massive, incommunicable agony on a scale beyond comprehension. I felt shredded by it, like every atom of my body had been torn apart and flung in all directions with incredible force. But of course, I wasn’t really here. I had no body. When my mind recovered from the shock, I put it together.

  The cube, the … the collection of universes and dimensions or whatever. Reality. That’s your home?

  Nothing.

  And the parasite, it kicked you out of there. Took over. Right?

  Nothing.

  Great. Now I’m getting the cold shoulder from a cosmic whale.

  I don’t get it. I don’t get how to help you. I want to, I really do. That’s my home in there somewhere. It’s so small and utterly meaningless to things like you, I’m sure, but it’s all I’ve got and they’re killing it. If I can help, like you seem to think, you have to tell me how.

  A layer slid out from the cube and wrapped itself around me. I had the sensation of falling from a great height, while simultaneously drowning in the deepest ocean, crushed by billions of tons of liquid force. Then the expansion stopped, and I found myself parked in the field of angels again. Frozen lights scattered through blackness.

  For a very long time—or perhaps no time at all, it was hard to tell in here—nothing happened. Then my point of view shifted closer to the nearest angel. Closer again. Even closer, until I was practically inside of the thing. All I could see was furious screeching white, impossible angles, and sharp lines that twisted round and intersected themselves. I couldn’t take it. I tried to cover my eyes, pictured my hand coming up before my face. I brushed against the angel—maybe not my physical body, but my presence—and it recoiled. Thin brown cracks spread out from the point of contact, networking like veins or lightning strikes. They branched off and multiplied until the entire ball of light was overtaken. I’d seen something similar once before, when I’d been inside the angels, just before I shattered them. But it didn’t break apart this time, it just splintered and splintered until there was no surface left untainted.

  The corrupted angel floated there inert, dull mud against the blanket of black. My point of view pulled back dramatically. I thanked god I didn’t have a stomach here, so I couldn’t puke in the space between dimensions. From my new angle, I was looking at an extreme close-up of the cube, at the point where two layers met. The inert angel I had just touched overlapped slightly with a still-brilliantly white one on the next layer. Slowly, the color began to seep from the brown orb to the white one, until it, too, was riddled with cracks. My point of view pulled out again, and again—each time showing me the same thing: cra
cks spreading from angel to angel, snaking up the tube of light until it was light no more. Fully outside the cube now, I could see the cracks spreading like a disease, from one tentacle to the next, poisoning the nest until the whole siphonophore was the color of a dead tree. When the last light diminished, the tentacles disintegrated entirely, dissolving into dust and disseminating into space.

  That was the end of the show.

  Nothing happened for a while.

  I don’t know how to describe the feeling of an impossibly gigantic, creation-spanning creature waiting on a response from you. It was the sinking sensation you get after you’ve been pulled over, while you’re waiting for the cop to get out of his car and walk up to your window. But obviously multiplied by a number so large that it probably doesn’t technically exist.

  Yeah, okay, yes.

  I thought to myself, assuming the entity would pick it up.

  I get it. The link is how I bring them down. I don’t kill the next angel entirely, I just like … poison it somehow and let it spread. Right?

  Nothing. It doesn’t like rhetorical questions, I guess.

  So why me? I’m a freak, I get that. But what makes me different from the freaks that came before me? Why couldn’t they help you?

  Bacteria. Or cells, or … something microscopic. A squiggly thing with two weird appendages snaking out. They reached toward a spiky blob. The thing and the blob fought. The blob won. The squiggly thing died. The scene repeated—this time there were three weird appendages on the squiggly thing. Fighting. Death. And again and again and again—more appendages, different shapes, the results always the same (death and death and death)—but there was progress made each time, until finally, the squiggly thing wrapped itself around the spiky blob, and absorbed it.

  I’m like an … immune response? You’re just what, changing us a little bit each time, and then throwing us at the parasite until one of us finally wins?

  No response.

  That’s messed up.

  A quaver.

  We’re not bacteria.

  A wobble.

  FUCK. YOU.

  The entirety of the non-space groaned, wavered, and abruptly transformed into the face of an extremely ugly, beaten-up old man with beer breath.

  “Gah!” I yelled, and pushed the face away.

  “What?! Jesus fuckin’ hell, Kaitlyn!” Carey said, falling backward out of the Camry’s passenger door and onto the warm asphalt of the I-10, still searing in the Arizona sun.

  “What happened? Where am I? How long was I gone?”

  “I don’t know, like thirty seconds?” Carey said. “We just noticed you were missing and were about to go look for you—”

  “I was about to go look for you,” Jackie corrected.

  “I was gonna go too! I was just heading to the car first for a search-and-rescue burrito…”

  “Then you just sorta popped up here in the backseat,” Jackie finished.

  “It was only thirty seconds? It felt like days, maybe even weeks.…”

  “Where the hell did you go?” Carey asked, pushing himself into a squatting position outside the car. He surreptitiously snuck a hand into the backseat. He rummaged around in the burrito bag without breaking eye contact.

  “Outer space at first, and then this un-place beyond space where the universal cube was.…”

  Jackie looked at me like you look at your grandma when she can’t remember your name. Carey was still feigning concern as he stole and unwrapped his burrito. Still giving me the knit-eyebrow “I’m listening” expression, even as he took the first bite.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said, pushing myself upright and scooting back up against the far door. I pulled my knees up and buried my face between them. The sun was stupidly bright, after spending so much time in the dark and the non-space. “I think I used my power again. Like I felt this draft of energy, so I followed it out, and something was waiting for me.…”

  “The angels?” Jackie ventured.

  “No, like a … a presence. I don’t know. It was massive. I got this kind of mental image of a sorta whale … like … thing, floating out in space.”

  “And what did the space whale tell you to do, Kaitlyn?” Carey asked, still maintaining his fake concern, but obviously stifling laughter.

  “God damn it, it made more sense while it was happening.” I looked to Jackie for understanding, but she was still giving me the “maybe it’s time for a nursing home” face. “It was real! It happened! And it told me what the angels are, and how to kill them. I think I even understand what I am now.”

  Carey, mouth too full of burrito to talk, just rotated his wrist, indicating I should keep going.

  “The angels aren’t just here, in our reality. They’re in every reality, and they’re linked between them. They’re their own creatures here, but they’re also part of this one massive colony so complex that it’s a whole different creature that exists across entire dimensions. And that colony-creature is sucking the life out of everything, everywhere. The angels solve life where they find it, and use the leftover energy to feed the rest of the colony, taking as much as they can without destroying the entire food source. It’s a massive parasite using the whole of existence as a host. That’s why the … the space whale … needs me. It can’t live here with the parasite.”

  Neither Jackie nor Carey responded.

  “I think, based on this sort of layered cube of universes that the entity showed me, that I finally get what it was I actually did back in Mexico. What I did just now. People like me, the mutations, we take some of an angel’s power when we kill it. I’m not teleporting from place to place; I’m stepping between dimensions like the angels do.”

  “This is a super helpful space whale,” Carey said, not bothering to suppress the laughter this time.

  “Are you sure this wasn’t like, a dream, or a hallucination or something, K?” Jackie shoved Carey out of the way and knelt on the seat across from me. She put her hands on my knees and stared right into my eyes.

  “No—or maybe yes, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still true.”

  Jackie bit her lip.

  “What, you’ve seen angels that solve people like math problems, and tar men that melt your skin, and immortal B-list celebrity psychos, and you’re drawing the line here? This is the thing that’s too absurd to believe?”

  Jackie peered back over her shoulder at Carey, who was squatting on the side of the highway powering through a cold burrito so hard he was eating bits of the aluminum foil. He shrugged.

  “I guess not? I don’t know, K. This whole deal—going back to L.A. at all, much less going there to look for the angels and the faceless dudes—it doesn’t seem very … not stupid.”

  “Well, you don’t have to come,” I snapped.

  Right, Kaitlyn. This is Jackie’s fault. She doesn’t believe in your magic space whale and doesn’t want to die fighting an inter-dimensional parasite. She’s being totally unreasonable.

  “No really, you don’t though,” I said, and put my hands over hers. “And I don’t mean that in an angry way, or a hurt way—you really don’t have to come. It’s so risky. I told you before: Nobody will blame you for bailing. We’ll still be okay. I’ll be okay. You can get out of this and just go be safe.”

  “Aw,” Carey said, wadding up his empty aluminum foil into a ball and tossing it blindly over his shoulder. “Thank you!”

  “Not you, asshole,” I said. “I was just talking about Jackie. You got me into this crap, you’re damn well seeing it through to the end.”

  Carey laughed. “I don’t care why you’re doing it, I’m on board as long as we’re killing angels and their little butt-buddies.”

  “I’m on board because it’s you, K. Not because the space whale told you to, or because I think it’s a good idea to go picking fights with light bulbs that disintegrate people. I’m on board because I’m always on board with you and your stupid, stupid plans.”

  I smiled at Jackie.

 
“That’s not me, Jackie,” I said. “You’re always the one with the dumb ideas, and I’m always along for the ride.”

  “Yeah, well…” She backed out of the car ass-first, and Carey made a big show of watching. “Turnabout is fair play.”

  She held out her hand to help me up, and I took it.

  FIVE

  }}}Carey. 1981. Valencia, California. Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park.}}}}}}}}}

  I smashed the pedal to the floor and ducked down just as the lip of the go-kart caught the Empty One in the shin, nearly shearing his leg off at the ankle. He didn’t make a sound. His creepy little half smile never even faltered as he crumpled over the cockpit and rolled across my back.

  “Ha, that’s one for me!” I yelled to Randall, who was coming around the loop just opposite me on the track.

  “Check again, Speed Racer,” he yelled, flipping me the bird.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw a hand, white-finger-clutching the roll bar.

  Did I cut off that guy’s arms too? Awesome.

  Then a face popped up just behind the hand, still smiling at me like I was a precocious child misbehaving at a library.

  Shit.

  The Empty One had latched onto the kart at the last second, his legs and lower torso dragging on the track as I whipped through the corners. He brought his other hand around the side of the open cockpit and grabbed my arm. His grip sent blue bolts of pain zipping through my neck. He bore down so hard he impaled himself on the shoulder-spikes of my leather jacket, but showed no sign of letting up. My kart veered wildly, nearly tipping over at the big bend where the track doubled back. I wedged my knees into the steering wheel, keeping my foot down fast on the gas pedal—if I slowed down enough for him to get any leverage, he’d take my head clean off—and tried to pry him loose. It was like being caught in a bear trap. I beat on his face as best I could from the awkward angle, poked at his eyes, pulled at his fingers. Nothing. He just kept smiling quietly.

  I took the S-curve way too fast. The kart teetered on one side, then the other, then crashed down flat and weaved across the straightaway. I was coming up on a bend where the track nearly met itself, and could see Randall hauling ass down the opposite side. He saw the pained expression on my face, and started to yell something, but I cut him off.