Kill All Angels

by Robert Brockway

  More silent minutes crouched painfully between sea-slick slabs of broken pavement, listening to the static of distant waves.

  I reached out and tugged again, this time more urgently. Instantly Zang’s lips were brushing my ear. I shuddered, just to have him so close.

  “Do not do this thing you are doing,” he whispered.

  “Why are we stopped?” I whispered back, unsure if he was still close enough to hear me … or if volume even mattered to a thing like him.

  A pause, and then his cool breath in my ear again.

  “You said you have taken two of the angels?”

  I nodded. Then felt stupid for it. I was about to speak instead, but apparently Zang saw the gesture.

  “You should be better than you are,” he said. “You are too attached to your humanity. You do not accept that you can do things beyond them now. The others that came before you embraced this. This is why they were better, and you are worse.”

  This conversation is turning strangely critical for a “save the world” mission.

  “Listen harder,” he continued, before I could protest.

  I did, and heard nothing. Just the terrestrial rumble of the waves beneath my feet.

  “For what?” I asked, barely able to hear my own voice.

  “You need to stop thinking you are human,” he said. “You assume limitations you no longer have.”

  I felt a twist of anger in my belly.

  “I am human, and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be listening for.”

  I felt a hand land on my ankle. It pawed around, confirming that this was, indeed, an ankle, then it proceeded carefully up my thigh until it rested on my ass. It tapped.

  I turned around and whispered in Carey’s general direction.

  “Knock it off, pervert.”

  “Why are we stopped?” he whispered back.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Zang’s being a jerk.”

  “I will need capable allies to help me get through here,” Zang replied. “I am trying to turn you into one.”

  “Real funny,” I said.

  “Who are you talking to?” Carey asked.

  “He can’t hear me,” Zang said. There was something off with his voice. It was so soft I could barely hear it, but so harsh it was like screaming in my ear. “You shouldn’t be able to hear me, either. I’m standing ten feet away from you now.”

  Goosebumps tracked down my forearms.

  “Now, listen for what’s below the sounds you hear.”

  I held my breath for a moment, then exhaled slowly. I tried to find that same mental space I’d occupied when I stopped time—or whatever it was I actually did—back in Jackie’s parents’ kitchen. I modulated my air, letting it out slowly, bringing it in even slower, trying to erase the transitional period between inhale and exhale. I felt the broken pavement: The irregular grooves became mountains, the slight dimples became valleys. I could feel the difference in textures where they’d once painted the traffic lines, though those had surely faded years ago. I felt every tiny droplet of water in the air as it landed on my skin, though I’d been continually soaked from the moment we set foot on the beach. I listened to the grating of metal on …

  Metal?

  It was like Zang said: a sound somehow below what I could hear. It was almost a tactile sensation; I could sense it in the tiniest bones of my ear. There was something metallic out there in the dark, whirring softly. Like a weathervane spinning in the wind, though there was no wind back here. Whatever it was, its joints were old and rusted—they labored and caught, paused, and reluctantly resumed. The noise was coming from somewhere far ahead and off to the left of us, where the broken asphalt opened up. I could hear the peninsula ahead.

  That’s weird. That’s a weird thing to be able to hear.

  The remnants of those great waves that crashed against the breakwater shushed along the perimeter of a landmass extending out into the water a few hundred meters in front of us, their soft lapping showing me the shape of the place. The bay wasn’t covered overhead—we weren’t in a cave, but at the bottom of a gargantuan sinkhole. You could see the night sky if you looked up, but none of the light made it down this far. I got the feeling the sun didn’t shine here during the day, either—it had the atmosphere of a place that lived entirely in the dark. The mustiness of a forgotten closet. The stillness of an attic you didn’t know you had.

  “What is that?” I said, little more than mouthing the words.

  Zang still heard me.

  “Look,” he said.

  In my head, I began to sarcastically explain what dark means to humans, but he was right: If I looked beyond the dark, I could actually see. Not very well—it was like the city at night, those few darkest hours before dawn still barely navigable by the secondhand light of distant streetlamps.

  I could see that the four of us were squatting in a shallow ditch made of broken pavement slabs. Just beyond us, the street opened up a bit into something like a cul-de-sac. Deep cracks ran all throughout the pavement, but it was largely intact. You could see how it all happened, when the earthquake first struck and the neighborhood sank. It didn’t fall straight away, as I’d initially and probably naïvely assumed. There was a landslide, and the whole place slid down a steep grade that had since eroded away. The jagged path we’d been walking was the main fault line where Costa Soberbia had broken away from the land above.

  Beyond us, forming the bulk of the peninsula was a nearly intact suburban neighborhood. A few dozen houses were peppered here and there, mostly high-end ranches, new builds back in the ’70s when the neighborhood had stood whole. They were now in rampant disrepair—what few rooms hadn’t collapsed in the slide slowly gave way to the ocean air and neglect. Not enough sunlight down here for weeds or any other plant life, just the occasional skeleton of a tree or carefully planted shrub lining what had once been a pristine lawn. At the far end of the peninsula, where the pavement jutted farthest into the water, one building stood out from the others. It must have been a few stories tall before the fall, but only the ground floor and a few crumbling remnants of the second remained. Still, the first story seemed mostly intact—even the door remained.

  There were people scattered all throughout the broken streets, wandering pointlessly like background characters in a poorly coded video game. A chubby lady in a tattered sundress stood before a rusty mailbox, opening and closing it incessantly. Three pale children in sea-worn rags huddled together in the center of the cul-de-sac, idly kicking nothing back to one another, as though they once had a ball but had long since lost it. Just beyond them, a skinny man in filthy denim shorts pushed a manual lawnmower back and forth over a dirt lot.

  The whirring sound.

  There were other faces, I saw now—most of them half-glimpsed through holes torn in the crumbling houses. Each was going about some forgotten task, or else just standing there blankly, waiting for input. When I tried to focus on their details, I came back with only a blurry impression and the start of a headache. If I’d been anybody else, I would have chalked that up as a trick of the dark.

  “What are they?” I asked Zang.

  “Unnoticeables,” he said. “You’ve seen them before.”

  “Not like this,” I said. “The ones we saw were almost like people. They talked to us and did things. They blended in.”

  “We create the Unnoticeables,” Zang said. “Because it was what was done to us by the angels. We try to empty them out of their painful human complications.”

  The first night I met Marco. Struggling with the door in his Mercedes. His lips against mine. Something mercurial sliding past them, into my stomach, draining me …

  I fought back sudden nausea.

  “It is a pathetic attempt at re-creation,” Zang continued. “What we birth is nowhere near as beautifully austere as the things the angels create. But still, the Unnoticeables are useful. We leave them enough humanity to function, to fit in, to be our eyes in your world. Most of us do, anyw
ay. Jie does not. Jie takes as much as she can from them, and leaves them like this. Shells that only barely remember what it was to be alive.”

  “What are you muttering up there?” Carey whispered from behind me. The abrupt change in volume made me jump.

  “Hush,” Zang said.

  “What?” Carey whispered.

  “Hush!” I said, right in his ear.

  He flinched and fell back onto his butt. His eyes went wide and he pawed around in the dark, feeling out for me.

  Right. He can’t see … because he’s still human.

  “So what,” I said to Zang. I could see him now, perched atop an outcropping of natural rock amidst the asphalt debris. “I have super senses now?”

  “No,” he said. “You are not hearing or seeing anything. You are just aware of things as they are, without being limited by the crude meat machines that are your eyes and ears. If you continue consuming angels, your awareness will extend. You will see things that happened in the past, that will happen in the future—distant places, potential events. You will become unstuck from the hindrances of time and distance, as the angels are.”

  The outlines I had seen in Jackie’s kitchen—potential paths laid out before me. The visions in the desert—the cube in cross-section, the thing beyond the edges of the universe, waiting …

  “But for now,” Zang continued, “it is enough that you are not entirely useless. Come. Do not let them see you.”

  “Or what? They’ll mow their lawns at me?” I asked.

  “They do not like new input. They do not deal well with change. They will scream. And if they scream, the tar men will come.”

  Oh, right. It’s kinda weird that you can just forget all about the flesh-melting monsters in the shadows.

  I turned back and saw Carey and Jackie, both frozen in awkward squats, straining to hear or see something through the darkness. Pity lurched about in my stomach—at first for them and how sad and limited they seemed, and then for myself and what I was becoming.

  There are better places to mope than a sunken city populated by monsters, Kaitlyn.

  I moved toward Carey, making just slightly more noise than I had to, to let him know I was coming this time.

  “We’re here,” I whispered in his ear. He still flinched. “There are Unnoticeables everywhere, but these don’t really have brains. We just have to avoid upsetting them and we’ll be all right.”

  “What happens if we upset them?” Carey sneered. “They gonna call their shrinks?”

  “Just shut up for now,” I answered. Then added, “and also in general.”

  Jackie was leaning against the far side of the ditch, her head tilted back to rest against one of the pavement slabs. Her eyes looked up at nothing, unfocused. Her hands were clenched into small, white fists, pressed into the thighs of her jeans. Her jaw muscles were locked, her breathing too fast.

  I should tell her, too. The only way we’re getting through this is just to talk, about anything …

  “Tell Jackie,” I said to Carey instead. “We’re moving.”

  He did, and the three of us formed a crouching, single-file line. We held hands, so as not to get separated in the dark. I motioned for Zang to come over and join us, but he just stared at me blankly until I realized it on my own. He didn’t have to guide us now—I was doing his job.

  Should I tell Carey and Jackie I’m the one leading them? That’s a bit of a complicated conversation to conduct entirely in terrified whispers.…

  No, let them go on thinking I was just as blind as they were. What did it matter? They already thought they were being led through the dark by something inhuman. Technically, nothing had changed.

  Zang went first, strolling casually toward the end of the cul-de-sac, then skirting around its edges, moving from shadow to shadow whenever the Unnoticeables looked away. I watched him for a while before following, to get a sense of just how much the Unnoticeables could see down here. They didn’t seem to be doing much better than Carey or Jackie—they navigated more by memory than sight, like walking to the bathroom at night. They stuck to small, repeating routes, if they moved at all. As long as we stayed quiet and didn’t stray to within a few feet of them, they’d never know we were here.

  I squeezed Carey’s hand twice, letting him know we were about to move, and then gave him a second to do the same for Jackie. I went up over the lip of the ditch first, then waited for them to follow. That’s how we proceeded: me taking a couple of steps ahead, until our arms were fully stretched out, then waiting for them to close the gaps. We were infinitely slower than Zang, with our awkward little group crab shuffle, but we followed his trail just fine. We edged around the three children playing their long forgotten game in the center of the round. I gave them plenty of space, just because I could. I didn’t need to look into those tiny, pale faces—even if I could have seen through the haze of the Unnoticeable effect, I didn’t want to register those dull and sightless little eyes.

  We approached the first home on the block, little more than the framework of a garage and some crumbling walls. Two more Unnoticeables sat inside what used to be the living room: rusty springs from a rotted-away couch, the framework of a collapsed table, a burned wooden box that used to be a massive TV set. The pair sat cross-legged on the floor, facing one another, each repeatedly reaching up to touch the other’s mouth. They giggled softly when they found each other, went quietly blank for a moment, then started the game again. I don’t know what memory they were trying and failing to relive, and I didn’t want to guess. We moved on. Past the trampled white picket fence, now gone seawater gray, and into the next yard. A rusted metal swing set there, the seats rotted away, just rusty chains hanging from a steel bar, the whole thing looking like some ancient implement of torture.

  At the next house, we lost Zang.

  Well, I lost Zang.

  Carey and Jackie didn’t even notice. They were staring straight ahead, saucer-eyed, into and at nothing, their faces slack. The way we look when we know nobody is looking. I brought them to a halt while I peered into the darkened corners, trying to find something like a human body moving with purpose.

  I thought of what Zang had told me earlier, about this not being sight in the sense that I know it. It was more like an objective awareness of my surroundings that came from a different place. I focused on that concept and felt the world shudder for a second, a single frame of my surroundings flashing before me—starkly lit, washed out, everything looking oddly naked and exposed. It was like the split second after a lightning strike. But the scene was gone as fast as it came, far before I could actually process what I had seen.

  I guess my mind is still mired in this pesky humanity for a bit longer, anyway.

  Something moved inside the house. The three of us were squatting in a damp dirt pit that had once been somebody’s immaculately groomed backyard. Between us and the home it belonged to, there was a wide stone patio littered with the shattered framework of a few lawn chairs. They formed a semicircle, surrounding a twisted metal husk that used to be an old barbecue grill. The chairs had surrendered their fabric a long time ago, now just skinny aluminum bars reaching in toward the grill as though in worship. Beyond them, an empty space where a sliding glass door had once stood. Beyond that, nothing. Parts of this house still supported a roof, and I couldn’t see into the darkness beneath it.

  Come on, your stupid brain is just inventing that limitation. See through it. Look harder, you weak little hum—

  There it was again. Something definitely moved in there. My stubborn eyes refused to pick out details from the wall of blackness inside the house, but they did register movement. It was quick and purposeful, not at all like the languid, dreamy fugue of the Unnoticeables down here.

  “Wait here,” I whispered to Carey, and before he could argue, I released his hand and crept toward the doorway.

  I stalled at the threshold and gave it a few seconds, hoping maybe my eyes would adjust. When that didn’t happen, I dropped to all fo
urs and crawled blindly into the dark.

  The carpet had the texture of cold, week-old oatmeal. It squirmed beneath my fingers like something living, trying to escape being crushed under my weight.

  Oh Christ, I hope that’s carpet.

  Just guessing at the layout of the house, I supposed I was crawling through the master bedroom. It was the kind of obscenely immense space nobody could possibly use, meant mostly as a status symbol for rich housewives who’d fill it with superfluous couches and end tables—like they were all just dying to host cocktail parties in their god damn bedrooms. I thought of my own cramped but cozy little cave, barely big enough for the mattress, my soft, enveloping pillows and my fluffy comf—

  Stop. No use pining for things you’ll never see again. Besides, dummy, you don’t even sleep anymore.

  At the far end of the gargantuan bedroom, a collapsed wall let more light into a long and narrow hallway, at the end of which stood a larger room, its corners lost to shadow, though most of its ceiling was open to the elements. Something skirted my vision down there—a sudden and precise movement out of the light and into the shadow.

  It has to be Zang. Please, God, let it be Zang.

  I pawed further into the darkness, keeping my eyes on the single unwavering square of light that was the door into the hall. I was mere inches from it, speeding my crawl just to hurry out of this awful black space, when something cold seized my wrist with a grip like iron.

  God damn it all, I screamed.

  Like some knock-kneed ditz in a horror film.

  Screw you, Kaitlyn.

  A hand covered my mouth instantly, cutting off the sound almost the second it left me. A voice whispered in my ear:

  “Quiet! What are you doing?”

  Zang.

  But if he’s here, then what …

  Shuffling footsteps coming from outside. Heading toward us.

  “The Unnoticeables—they heard you,” he said. “Back to the yard, quickly. If they don’t see us—”