Kill All Angels

by Robert Brockway

  A sound like a zipper catching fabric and Zang was gone.

  His hands were violently yanked from my wrist and mouth, but not before they brought me with him—hauling me off my feet and sending me sprawling on my side in the dark bedroom.

  I could hear a violent scuffle somewhere very close to me, though neither combatant made a sound: just the muffled slap of fist on flesh, clothes tearing, bodies bumping into walls.

  I spun, trying to orient myself in a sea of black. My face brushed into something smooth. It smelled like wet death and gave with sickening ease under pressure. I felt around it. The bed. I pressed my back against the waterlogged mattress, grateful for some semblance of solidity. Before me, the dark was absolute and unbroken. I must be on the far side of the bed, between it and the wall. The fight continued somewhere behind me, growing in intensity. The blows came faster now, the thumps more violent. Still no sounds from the combatants themselves, though: no groans, swears, or even exhalations of effort.

  I turned and peered up over the edge of the bed. Backlit against the empty frame of the sliding glass door, a snarl of silhouetted limbs twisted and clawed at each other. I slid around to the foot of the bed, as far away from the writhing black mass as I could get, pointed myself toward the door—the dim light of the open backyard shining like a beacon—and broke into a blind, dead sprint.

  You never appreciate just how little faith you have in the world until you start running as fast as you can in utter darkness. I knew, objectively, that I had just crawled through this space moments before. That this whole section of street seemed to be relatively solid, and that the odds of some bottomless pit yawning open directly in my path right now were infinitely low. But still, I didn’t trust a single footfall. Every stride I took was off the edge of a cliff into an eternal black void. They were hardest eleven steps of my life.

  But I made it!

  Out through the doorway—oh shit, can’t stop—clipping my shin on a partially collapsed deck chair, sprawling into the grill—hands up, break the fall—catching a rusty spear through the soft flesh of my underarm—spinning, watch the head—hitting hard on the stone patio, feeling teeth break, tasting blood.

  I stared at nothing for a few seconds, gasping like a landed fish and clutching at the ground, my brain still trying to catch up with all the damage that my body had just incurred. A broken shape slammed into the dirt directly in front of me. It rolled end over end, sickeningly slack, before finally settling into a limp and formless heap. It was so misshapen, it took me a minute to register Zang’s scrappy leather jacket in there. Then his arms. Then his head, resting right next to his skinny, bare ankles. He’d been torn nearly in half.

  I turned and looked for what did it. Looming in the doorway was a bearded mountain of flesh in filthy overalls. He had to be eight, ten feet tall, and you’d have to describe his weight in small cars. A Geo Metro, at least. With one hand, he heaved a monstrous axe onto his shoulders. I don’t know anything about axes. I don’t know what type of axe it was, but at a glance I’d say “the kind the bad guy uses in a fantasy movie.” The thing probably outweighed me.

  From behind me, Zang giggled softly, though his exhalations were thick and liquid. From somewhere far ahead, a high and breathless scream. It was immediately joined by another, and another, until they formed a choir of shrieking voices.

  TWENTY-TWO

  }}}Jackie. 2013. Los Angeles, California. Costa Soberbia.}}}}}}}}}

  At first, it really was for revenge. I’d gone full Inigo Montoya for a few hours, the anger urging me on, filling me up, making me feel full and strong. Like a badass on a mission, instead of a skinny white girl in waaaaay over her head. But then …

  Oh god, this is so stupid. I don’t even want to admit it to myself.

  I stewed in fury the whole car ride from Brentwood to here, scowling like a pixie-cut Charles Bronson. I even kept it up for the first few feet down that terrifying cliffside trail. But as soon as we came to that broken section, where the ground gave out and it was just broken rocks and crashing waves like a hundred feet down? All the anger left and I was just cold and I just wanted to go home.

  So why didn’t you, Jackie? Huh? Why, exactly, did you do the stupidest thing in the universe and crawl down into the Village of the Damned without so much as a flashlight?

  Well I’m super glad you asked, Jackie. I didn’t turn back because I didn’t want to look like a pussy in front of the people that just got my parents killed.

  No seriously, that was it. That was the whole reason. I’d made such a big show of coming with them, that I just couldn’t bear to turn to Kaitlyn and Carey and Zang—all of whom totally dealt with and pretty much deserved this life—and tell them that I’d lost my nerve. So, instead, I was just going to lose my life.

  I wonder when I got this stupid, exactly? Like, when was the precise moment it happened? When I hit my head in that skateboard crash in seventh grade? When I huffed spray-paint behind the 7-Eleven to impress Tommy Zucker? Or is it just a slow degradation of brains that continues even now? Maybe I’ll just get stupider and stupider until one day I eventually wind up eating out of a bucket. God, I should be so lucky to live long enough for a feed bag.

  I’m definitely going to die down here. No question.

  Carey’s hand in mine was actually pretty comforting. I always pictured touching him to be slimy somehow, like his personality could ooze out of his pores, coating him in a thin film of beer-sweat and sexism. Like actual, liquid sexism. But no, it was relatively dry, warm, and firm without being crushing. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was either scared himself, or else trying to comfort me.

  But I do know better.

  All of these people are insane and selfish. Carey might not be technically inhuman, like that Asian guy and Kaitlyn, but there’s still something wrong with him inside.

  Kaitlyn, Jesus—it’s weird to even call her that, now. I should come up with a new name for her. If only so I don’t disparage the memory of my friend by pretending I recognize this awful thing that took her place.

  Crazy K?

  Killer K?

  Kryptonite K?

  These sound like B-list professional wrestlers.

  Wait, am I really going to die with these as my last thoughts?

  I guess I always figured when the end came you’d be thinking about something deep, but nope—my inner monologue is just as inane as ever. That’s almost comforting to know.

  But hey, gotta think about something down here in the dark. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to see. I’d been staring so long into solid, unrelenting black that I’d be genuinely surprised if I ever saw something again. What actually was the last thing I saw?

  Carey’s exposed buttcrack as he crouch-walked in front of me, into the dark.

  Great. That’s actually perfect. Totally fitting with the rest of my life.

  They say your other senses become heightened when you take one away, but so far that was bullshit. Instead of becoming Daredevil and echolocating my way through the blackness, all I could hear was the distant rumble of crashing waves and the occasional grumble from Carey. We’d been stuck here, squatting uselessly for what were probably minutes, but felt like decades. I’d asked him what was going on when we first stopped, but he just grunted at me and squeezed my hand. Now I was too busy pretending I was still a vessel of righteous anger—and not about to pee my jorts in terror—to pursue the point.

  I stared deep into the hypnotic black for so long that I honestly forgot whether I was awake or asleep. Sleeping would make so much more sense: This was just a crazy nightmare brought on by smoking too much weed while binge-watching Home Room on cable. This being reality—me squatting here blind in an underwater monster suburb? That was the absurd option. I could almost feel the plush fabric of my parents’ couch, hear the TV’s canned laugh track after J.C. Sable called Spaz a “real nerd’s nerd.” Smell my dad grilling fish in the backya—

  A short, sharp scream.

>   A scream was bad enough: That it cut off so quick was gut-wrenching.

  Was that … was that Kaitlyn?

  Oh, no, Jackie, there are tons of other girls just wandering these pitch-black ruins—this is the new hip spot to be seen, metaphorically speaking. Pitch-black fucking monster ruins are the new Silver Lake, don’t you know? Of course it was Kaitlyn. And she’s in big, big trouble.

  The dull twist of fear in my belly actually surprised me: Sometimes, no matter how hard you mentally write somebody off, your gut still calls them a friend. A surge of panic, up from the soles of my feet, creeping across the back of my neck, tingling in the back of my skull.

  Something tugged at my hand.

  Oh, right: Carey.

  What is he doing?

  He’s holding me back.

  Why is he holding me back?

  Wait, back from where?

  Holy shit, where am I going?

  The second Kaitlyn screamed, I began automatically crawling toward the source of the sound. Like a totally and completely insane idiot. And like a much more insane and far completer idiot, I was still doing it.

  “Stay put!” Carey hissed.

  “We have to help,” I pleaded, as much to the enveloping blackness as to Carey.

  Let us see. Let us go. Let us help.

  “We can’t,” he said.

  His responses were uncharacteristically short and to the point. No elaborate swears or jokes about my tits. Either he was trying to stay tactically quiet, or the bastard was scared. And if he was scared …

  “So we’re just going to cower here?” I asked. “Like a bunch of frightened little girls?”

  Wait for it. Please. Please be this stupidly macho. Please …

  “Hell no,” came the response, after an aching eternity. “You were just going the wrong direction.”

  He jumped ahead of me and pulled on my hand—apparently hoping I wouldn’t notice we were still going in the exact same direction—and I followed. Between the two of us, we probably spent more time falling than moving. Turning our ankles on unseen dips, snaring our wrists in invisible tangles, each of us loping awkwardly on three limbs, unwilling to let the other’s hand go and risk them being swept away in that sea of black.

  The texture of the ground changed from loose dirt to smooth pavement. I took it as a sign we were heading in the right direction, though there was absolutely no good reason to believe so. Carey had started ever so slightly veering off to the left, but I knew which way was straight. I yanked his hand. He yanked back. I yanked harder and felt him stumble. I won that argument.

  He fell in line behind me then, and I trekked through the void on my knees, outstretched fingers groping in front of me—hoping against hope they’d brush up against Kaitlyn’s long hair or thick shoulders instead of sinking into some unseen monstrosity. I hit something hard and splintery, felt around until I recognized it—the siding of a house—and let out a thin, quiet sigh of relief that lasted so long I felt light-headed after. We scooted along the exterior wall of the house, arms out, feeling for a door, a window, a broken section, anything. Then my fingers brushed against something strange in the darkness ahead—it was cool, slick, and rubbery. It gave a bit beneath my touch, but not completely. I moved my hands around it: some kind of skinny, warped pillar. No, scratch that, there were two of them, leading up to a point in the middle where they met and grew thicker.

  My stupid brain put it together seconds too late. Seconds after I realized it was skin that I’d been touching. The cool, damp skin of something that had lived down here in the dark for years. Seconds after I dumbly pawed my way up its legs and patted it right on the belly. Seconds after it started screaming its high-pitched, painful wail.

  From all around us, the others answered.

  TWENTY-THREE

  }}}Carey. 1983. Los Angeles, California. South Gate.}}}}}}}}}

  “Heads up!” Rosa laughed, and tossed me the severed head.

  I laughed with her, but it was pretty forced. Both because it was kind of a corny joke, and also because the head was still snapping at me. I juggled it like a hot potato, trying to keep the snatching jaws away from my fingers. When I finally got the head settled, she glared at me with piercing blue eyes. She was trying to say something, probably about my mother, going by the hateful expression, but seeing as she was at least temporarily parted from her lungs, the words came out as barely a whisper. I sure as hell couldn’t make out what she was trying to say over all the screaming.

  Rosa had one Unnoticeable in a headlock and another beneath her knee, pinning him to the concrete. There really didn’t seem to be much fight left in them, not since we’d killed the angel. A few seconds after the ball of light first blinked into existence, Rosa kicked opened the flimsy steel doors of the tool cabinet we’d been hiding in, jogged over and hopped right into the shrieking spotlight like she was cannonballing into a kiddie pool. She made it look so easy. Well, hell, in all fairness it was pretty easy these days. Had been ever since we’d taken her first angel in the ballroom of that boarded-up hotel.

  Damn, but you wouldn’t recognize this chick as the same one me and Zang scared half to death in her apartment. It’s hilarious now, to think of her all meek on her kitchen floor, like “please don’t rape me.” Now she held sparring sessions with Zang and dismantled him like your little sister’s Barbie doll. If I so much as thought of mouthing off to her, I only had to rub the scar on my back where she dislocated my shoulder to give it another think. She took to the life like a lonely dog to a leg, but it took forever for her to believe us.

  See, I’m of the opinion that once you see one impossible thing, you gotta consider that everything else could be possible. After I saw my first angel, looking like a cigarette burn in the film print of reality, shimmering with planes and angles that bent your mind, making a sound like an ocean of screams—well, ever since that night I pretty much accepted anything as a possibility. If you ran up to me on the street tomorrow and told me a gang of leprechauns was chasing you, the first thing I’d do is laugh. Then I’d start lacing up my boots in preparation for some magical-midget-stomping.

  Not Rosa, though. We showed her Zang with his neck broken in half and still dancing around like a goober, and she believed that he was something supernatural, sure. But that was it. She had to be shown every little thing—the people whose faces fade away the closer you look at them, the other Empty Ones walking among us—we practically had to feed her to a tar man before she believed in those. Shoulda seen her face when her first angel popped in about three feet above the soggy, rotting floorboards of The Senator Hotel. Me and Zang, we had to throw her into the angel when the time came. No shit: I held her legs. We did the ol’ heave-ho. We were supposed to let go on three, but I was late. She disappeared into the shrieking white void ass-first.

  Took her days to recover from angel number one, but ever since she opened her eyes, she’s been the fucking Tasmanian Devil. I thought Meryll was strong, but Rosa could pick up a damn car. A small one. Well, at least the back half, anyway. Look, she ripped this chick’s head straight off with her bare hands, and that’s enough for me. Oh, speaking of—one second.

  I dropped the head to the cement and kicked it away. No idea if that was the right thing—did Rosa toss it at me just to fuck with me, or was I supposed to do something? But at least it wasn’t looking at me with those accusing eyes anymore.

  We thought we’d find Jie here, in this run-down fur storage warehouse just outside Koreatown. There were plenty of Empty Ones inside—all Chinese except this one with the blue eyes—but that telltale silver bob was nowhere to be seen. This was the fourth angel we’d taken together, and still no sign of her. Four in eight months. Zang said it was remarkable that so many were in the area at all, much less that we’d taken every one—but like I said: Rosa made it easy.

  After that first angel went down, Rosa just sorta knew where the rest would be. Not just angels either: She knew exactly where to find Unnoticeables, tar men, even E
mpty Ones. Not specific ones, or else me and Zang would’ve gone straight for Jie, but it was like she had some interior monster radar. That made it so easy it almost wasn’t fun anymore—the third angel we took by just disengaging the parking brake on a nearby garbage truck, watching it bulldoze through a disused mansion in Carlsbad, then picking our way through the debris until we found a ball of light that—I swear to god—just hovered there looking confused. They don’t have faces, I know, but there’s no way the sucker was expecting that.

  It’s been like that every outing. No surprises. We’re finally the ones doing the ambushing. I think that’s why we let it go on so long: Zang had been riding me to “talk about the girl” since the second angel, but even he’d gone quiet after the garbage truck coup. We had a good thing going, and when you get hold of a good thing, you ride it until it goes bad.

  Everybody knows that, right?

  “You holding up a wall or what?” Rosa said. “Little help?”

  I blinked.

  I walked over and gave her my hand, easing her out from under a small pile of bodies. Guess I’d spaced out for the slaughter. It’s not like I’d been standing here lost in thought for hours—it had been maybe a minute since she chucked the severed head at me, and you’d think she’d give a guy a tick after that, but no. The more angels she took, the faster she got. The faster she got, the more impatient she got. Every conversation you had with her lately, she’d be checking out the windows, looking at her nails, hurrying you on like you were telling a joke she’d heard before. You could see it in her, those little bits of humanity wearing away at the edges.

  But then she smiled at you, like she was smiling at me right now—and face covered in blood and gore aside, she was glorious. There were a million prettier girls, a million better sets of teeth, and a million pairs of fuller lips. But none of them knew how to work it like Rosa. They say a smile lights up a room, well, Rosa was a damn disco ball. Her light left you all giddy and disoriented, staring and smiling like a nitwit just ’cause she flashed you some teeth.