Kill All Angels

by Robert Brockway

  For over a hundred years, Zang and Jie were together as Empty Ones. Over one hundred years that they spent torturing, murdering, and destroying anything that came between them, no matter how slight or accidental the trespass. They were worse than normal Empty Ones. They were paired. They exalted in each other, and that made their casual cruelty even worse.

  One hundred and eight years after they had been solved, Zang and Jie met another angel.

  It was here that the unit of Zang and Jie divided.

  Jie was grateful to the angel. She worshiped it like it was a god. She was happy for what she was—simplified, pure, empty—and wanted only to help the angel.

  Zang felt these stirrings, too. The thing that he was now enjoyed its new state. But the thing that he used to be, the man, remembered what had been taken from them. He remembered what Jie’s love was before the angel. And he was furious.

  Jie worshiped. Zang attacked.

  Jie was heartbroken and furious. She was being asked to choose between her lover and her god. It was a choice she could not make. Zang was heartbroken and furious. He was being asked to choose between his lover and vengeance. It was a choice he could make.

  He chose wrong. He chose revenge.

  Zang thrust Jie aside and dove at the angel. He was taken inside of it, to a screaming white void of impossible angles. The world inside of the angel was painful and horrible, but it was not chaotic or mad. It was order itself. The Empty One that was Zang understood order. He looked into the churning intersections there and tracked their path. He found his way to something familiar. He found his way to himself.

  This was the same angel that had simplified Zang and Jie, 108 years ago. It had used their energy. It had burned away their lives. But there were very small pieces of them left. Zang seized those pieces with everything he had. He took a small part of himself back. And he took a small part of Jie back, too.

  When he awoke, all of the skin had burned off of his body. His eyeballs had cooked in their sockets. He could see nothing. He could barely hear. He heard Jie. She told him that she could not forgive what he had done, and that if she saw him again, she would hurt him. That is the true tragedy, she said: that neither of them could die, so she could never kill him, as he deserved.

  Jie departed. Zang healed.

  He sought her out, to explain what he had done and why. To try to give her back the pieces he had stolen from the angel. But she was true to her word.

  She hacked him into pieces and scattered them around Los Angeles, California. It took weeks for his body to grow back from the neck-stump of his severed head. She buried him in concrete. It took months to dig himself out. She burned him, she shot him, she beat him, and she poisoned him. She never listened to him. But he never stopped trying.

  Zang, through his divine theft, had become more human than the other Empty Ones. But he had not become human. Not even close. He was still a monster, just one with a conscience. He still did not understand people. He still harmed people. All that was different now was that he could regret it.

  Zang had no place in this world, and had lost his only place in the world of monsters. He did the only measurably good thing he could think to do: He began killing his own kind. He found the weak and faceless spawn of his kin, the Unnoticeables, and he beat and broke them. He thwarted the plans of the Empty Ones. He knew their secrets. He knew of the ritual. He kept them from bringing about new angels, as best he could. And he sought out Jie, over and over again, hoping that this time, she would hear him.

  That is the story of Zang, and there is nothing more to it.

  TWELVE

  }}}Kaitlyn. 2013. Los Angeles, California. West L.A.}}}}}}}}}

  “What’s the holdup?” Zang laughed. He was standing just outside my door, bouncing up and down like an excited child. “Let’s go kill ourselves something beautiful!”

  “Could you not do that?” I said.

  “What?” He smiled. All innocence.

  “It’s creepy when you pretend to feel things,” I said to him. “I mean, it’s creepy when you’re all blank, too. But it’s a slightly more tolerable kind of creepy.”

  “I’m not pretending now!” He laughed. “This is the best day of my life!”

  I looked to Carey for backup. He just shrugged.

  “He’s really not pretending,” Carey said. “About the only thing that makes Zang genuinely happy is hurting the angels. We just told him he can kill one. This is his happy face.”

  I looked to Zang. He was smiling with his mouth open, the tops of his perfect white teeth just visible, glitter in his eyes.

  I shuddered.

  “Can we at least leave a note or something for Jackie?” I asked.

  “Sure thing,” Carey said from behind me, in the living room.

  He grabbed a pen and paper from the little IKEA desk I keep tucked away in the corner, mostly covered in laundry that isn’t dirty but doesn’t quite qualify as clean. He scribbled something down, then followed me out the front door. He slid it shut behind him, the edge of the note tucked between the door and the jamb.

  It read:

  Jackie,

  Gone killin

  B back soon

  —the A team

  “That’s not exactly helpful,” I said.

  Carey laughed.

  “What do you want me to say?” He slipped into an impression of a prissy little British girl. “My dearest Jackie, with much reluctance we have gone to rid the world of the vilest angels and their ilk. Think of us always, your friends and confidants, the esteemed Mr. Carroll, the genteel Ms. Kaitlyn, and oh yeah, this fucking monstrous half-guy you haven’t met yet. His name is Zang. He’s cool.”

  “Thank you,” Zang said, flatly.

  “It’s just the last time we talked,” I said, “I promised her I wouldn’t do any angel stuff. If she comes back here and sees this, she’s going to freak.”

  “Where’s she gone?” Zang asked.

  “Back to see her parents,” I answered.

  “No worries then!” he said, all chipper. “She won’t be coming back.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Oh, she’ll be dead or hollowed out or something. With Marco gone, that’ll leave Jie in charge of the search. The first thing she’ll do is convert any nearby family or friends, just in case you try hiding out with them. Don’t worry about Jackie,” he said, idly picking at his nails. “She’s been lost for a while.”

  * * *

  I wonder if anybody else has ever taken an Uber to a rescue mission.

  Jackie used our only car when she took off to visit her folks in Brentwood. Zang had taken the bus to my place, and Carey sacrificed his beaten-up old motorcycle trying to rescue me from an unholy church, back when this all started. That left us with public transportation, taxi, or other. The cab company said it would be twenty minutes before they could pick us up. The bus would also take too long—there were three transfers to get to Jackie’s place. Yes, we had to go back inside my apartment, turn on my laptop, and Google how to get there. Even as my best friend was probably being emptied out by freaks that used to be her own parents, we were on the L.A. Metro website selecting “quickest trip.”

  So we downloaded Uber. They had a car at our place within three minutes. It was a silver Prius with a bashed-in rear bumper. The driver was Nigerian, this was his very first fare as an Uber driver; he was trying to make some extra money to pay for singing lessons. That’s why he’d come to Hollywood, you see—he was convinced musicals were going to be the next big thing, and he wanted to get in on the ground floor. In the meantime, he worked as a valet at a nightclub downtown—he can totally get us in if we came by on Friday, that was when Frederich worked the door, who was very cool and would let us in without even paying the—

  I stopped listening somewhere around then.

  I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, but I couldn’t. I was full to bursting with a scrabbling panic. It occupied every inch of me. It clawed at the
insides of my chest, closed my throat, made my scalp and forearms itch. My eyes kept welling up like I was going to cry, but I couldn’t. Every word I spoke sounded distant in my own head, like somebody had recorded my voice on a cheap tape recorder and was playing it back from outside the car. I stared out the window and picked at the cracking vinyl on the back of the passenger seat.

  Zang sat by the other window, happily chatting away with the cabbie.

  The … Uberie? What the hell do you even call these people?

  I guess he appreciated the chance to practice being human. His small talk was all off, but like most everybody in L.A., the Uberie didn’t care: He was only listening long enough to find his turn to talk again. Carey sat between Zang and me. He was whispering stupid platitudes to me, about how it would be all right, and it would also be okay, and did he mention it would be all right?

  I wanted to elbow him in the teeth.

  All of this happened inside a bubble full of a dense gas that deadened both sound and emotion. I couldn’t listen to them prattle on if I wanted to. Nor could I cry, or scream, or leap out of this car and sprint down Santa Monica Boulevard tearing out my own hair—which I very much did want to do. I was stuck inside a god damn Prius, killing time in the waiting room outside of fear and rage.

  “Can we not take Santa Monica?” I leaned in between the seats and spoke to the cabbie, cutting off Zang in the middle of a charming little anecdote about the time he started a fire in the restroom of a bar that stopped serving him.

  The Uberie tapped his cell phone, mounted on a little plastic thing plugged into his CD player.

  “It says this is the best way,” he insisted, pointing at the map on his screen. There was a solid line running straight down Santa Monica and all the way off screen.

  “But it’s not,” I said. “Traffic’s always rough through here, especially on a nice day, and the buses are constantly making stops, slowing everything down. If you take a right on—”

  “They have this little map, you see,” the Uberie interrupted. “It tells you the best way to go.”

  I fell silent, trying to suppress the urge to shove his precious app right down his throat.

  “Speaking of fire,” the Uberie resumed his conversation with Zang. “I know this lady, this very cool lady, she does a dance with fire down on the promenade. She says you can make—”

  “If you don’t take the next right and get off of Santa Monica,” I said, reaching forward and gathering up a healthy portion of his arm fat between my thumb and forefinger. “I will pull the skin off of your testicles.”

  I pinched the fat and twisted as hard as I could. He screamed.

  “You’re crazy!” he yelled, and started cranking the wheel like he was gonna pull over. “I’m not driving you anywhere. You get out! You! Out!”

  He slammed the brakes, leaving the car stopped diagonal to the curb: the front vaguely pulled in the direction of “over,” while the rear blocked traffic for an entire lane. He flipped on his hazard lights though, so obviously it was fine.

  The driver started to turn around to yell at us face-to-face, but Zang leaned forward and wrapped his hands around the man’s throat from behind the driver’s seat. The Uberie froze up like somebody had just flipped his off switch.

  “I do not have the grip strength to pulverize your spine,” Zang said, in his dead man’s voice. “Not while it is fresh. I do have the grip strength to pulverize a dried spine. I know this from experience. But yours—no. It is still ripe. It is filled with fluid and therefore pliable. It will not crush. It will bend and squeeze. I can still sink my fingers through the flesh of your neck until I reach the spine, however. At that point I will wrap my right hand around the base of it, just above your collarbone. My left will remain higher on the spine, just below your jawline. By wrenching in two different directions at once, I will be able to break the spine and then twist your head until the tendons and veins rupture. I will then be able to pull your head off. It is a lot like taking the lid off of a very stuck jar.”

  We were all quiet.

  “Please do not do that?” the Uberie finally ventured.

  Zang considered the request for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said. “But only if you drive exactly how and where the girl says.”

  “Yes!” he sobbed.

  Zang did not release him.

  “And one more thing,” he added, switching back to his faux human voice. “You gotta tell me about that fire dancer! Do you have her number?”

  * * *

  The Uberie drove quickly and precisely through Santa Monica and up into the Brentwood hills. Zang had his hands around the driver’s throat the entire time, all while making the most terrifying small talk in history. The Uberie told him about the promenade performers he knew, what they made in a day, what they did for that money, what scams they pulled on the tourists when the day’s take was light. Zang told him about the shows he’d seen lately, the chicks he’d banged at them, and one very detailed story about chasing down and mauling some sort of giant rodent on the concrete banks of the L.A. River. He swore it wasn’t a rat. The Uberie told him it was probably a nutria—they had them everywhere, he said. He sobbed violently.

  We came to a very gradual and careful stop in the roundabout of Jackie’s parents’ driveway. I’d been here a few times before, but I’d never driven it. At least, not in L.A. I couldn’t afford a car. I mean, I came down here with one, but after sixteen tickets for not moving it on street cleaning days, I had to sell the thing. Now my internal geography of L.A. was based on bus lines and the views from the backseats of wealthier friends who could decipher the arbitrary code of the street sweeper schedules. We were somewhere in Brentwood, was all I knew. Somewhere very, very expensive, where people like me didn’t belong. You had to have better teeth than me to live here. They had to be that unnatural shade of shining white, like a fresh sheet of blank paper.

  The same color as Jackie’s parental home, incidentally. I don’t know a thing about architecture. I don’t know what you call this style, but it reminded me of New England somehow. Just bigger and gaudier. Like a house on a movie set built to look like New England. No big floor-to-ceiling windows here. Just dozens of small ones that looked out onto an utterly weed-free lawn with short, soft grass the texture of velvet.

  The Uberie made a strangled noise of confirmation. We were here.

  “I will choke you now,” Zang informed him, matter-of-factly.

  The driver tried to protest, but only gurgled.

  “No!” I said, “no killing!”

  I leaned up between the seats and tried to pry Zang’s fingers free. They were like iron. Like iron that had been welded to the driver’s skin. I might as well have tried to break the grip of a statue. The Uberie looked at me with hope in his eyes.

  “I know,” Zang answered. “I will choke him into unconsciousness, and then put him in his own trunk. This way he will not alert the authorities. At least, not soon.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  The hope in the Uberie’s eyes turned to hate for a second, then it turned to nothing and he was out.

  Zang released him, stepped out of the Prius, popped the trunk, and hauled the driver back there like an unwieldy grocery bag. Carey got out, too. He stretched his arms and yawned. I got out last. I made it all the way to the door and paused, my finger resting on the button for the bell.

  “Should we—” I turned to Carey and Zang, then heard a latch click.

  The door swung open. I had not yet rung the bell.

  It was Glenn, Jackie’s dad.

  “Hi, Glenn,” I said. “We’re here for the trap.”

  He leapt out and caught me in a big bear hug that, shockingly, did not end with him strangling me. He let go and then held me out at arm’s length, to survey.

  “You look great!” he finally decided, with a firm nod. As though the matter had been up for debate, but was now settled. Forever.

  “Who are your…” Glenn leaned to pee
r over my shoulder at Carey and Zang.

  Carey had his hands in his pockets. His shoulders tucked low. He was intently staring at something off to his right, deliberately not making eye contact. Zang stood too erectly, like a soldier at attention. Then, after seeing he was being observed, dropped quickly into a slouch and shot Glenn a pair of thumbs-ups and a shit-eating grin. It was the least convincingly human thing he could’ve done at that moment.

  “… friends?” Glenn finally ventured, giving me a worried look.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “This is Carey, we uh…”

  How the hell would two fairly normal girls like me and Jackie possibly know a scumbag like Carey?

  “He’s in Jackie’s improv class,” I said.

  Glenn rolled his eyes, but in a controlled way, that signified he was used to this.

  “And I don’t know that other guy. He’s just the Uber driver. He’s going to stay out here and wait for us,” I said, the last part while staring directly at Zang.

  He shrugged and walked around the Prius to the driver’s seat. He collapsed into it. The car rocked with his weight.

  “Come in!” Glenn said. “Was Jackie expecting you? She didn’t say anything, but then, she never does.…”

  Glenn stepped aside and held an arm out to the foyer. There were crudely carved wooden benches to each side, rough and unfinished in a way that signified each probably cost more than a midsize sedan. Aged tile floors, wrought iron fixtures, an old brass coatrack with only two coats on it: Jackie’s pale blue, puffy hooded vest thing, and some kind of thin purple duster.

  Who else was here?

  I stepped past Glenn, reasonably sure that an Unnoticeable wouldn’t bother bear-hugging me before flaying me, and motioned for Carey to follow. He spat on the driveway first, and sulked after me with his head down.

  What was his problem?

  I guessed that if I felt out of place here, this must be like walking on the sun for Carey. Sometimes it’s easier to live up to the preconceptions people have of you, rather than trying to fight them. I get that.