No sign of the little boy. God, that kid was creepy. Must’ve been seven or eight, but a thousand years old behind the eyes. Wore a three-piece suit, looking like a ventriloquist’s mannequin come to life. He didn’t happen upon a hammer and, fortune smiling upon him, use it to further sully my good looks. He had it with him the whole time. Pulled it out of a special velvet holster sewn inside of his jacket. Did it real slow, too, so I could see it.
I was not going to miss him.
I pushed myself up on my elbows, which was about as close as I could get to upright. The world still swam around like somebody shook my fishbowl. The room was mostly vacant now—just me, blood sealing one eye shut, dry-heaving into the collar of my leather jacket—and Rosa, crumpled up like a discarded burger wrapper in the far corner. The angel was gone. Same for all the Empty Ones that had been here just seconds (Minutes? Hours? Time’s funny when you take a hammer to it) ago. A bunch of greasy black marks on the floor now.
Rosa wasn’t moving, but I knew the drill. Old hat by now. She’d be up and around in a few minutes. Not in fighting shape, mind you, but a good night’s sleep—the only time she ever did anymore was after taking an angel—and she’d be up at 6 A.M., rattling around in the kitchen of Zang’s boathouse, totally heedless of the sanctity of my bedroom, which was the couch, and generally ruining my sunny disposition. Used to take her days to recover after taking an angel. Now it was like a bad hangover—gone with a night’s rest and a big, greasy breakfast. Zang would probably be all healed up by then, too. Even though they’d torn both of his arms off before chucking him out the window and into the Pacific Ocean.
It’s annoying, is what it is. Being the only one of your roommates who takes lasting damage. Like being the oldest guy at the party.
Somebody knocked on the door.
I stared at it, cross-eyed. Waited.
Knocked again.
Huh. Guess I wasn’t hallucinating.
I army-crawled on my belly until that got more frustrating than trying to stand. I hobbled the rest of the way to the door, threw the bolts, and opened it to a soaking wet and armless Zang. He flashed me a winning smile and stepped around me, into the ranger station.
“How did you knock?” was my first stupid question.
“With my head,” he answered.
“You all right?” was my second stupid question.
“What do you call a man with no arms and no legs lying in a bush?” he asked.
“I don’t … what?”
“Russell,” he finished.
It was the only joke I ever heard him tell. I was too shocked to laugh. Or maybe it just wasn’t funny. When it got no response, Zang dropped his pretense at humanity and lapsed into his usual monotone.
“I will try jokes another time,” he said. “I am fine. The arms will heal. You are also not dead, which is useful.”
At that, I laughed. It was the closest thing he could get to concern.
“Is it, now?” I asked, rubbing my bleeding scalp and wincing.
“It is,” he said. Never did get the hang of rhetorical questions. “Because it is time. I find myself temporarily fingerless, so you will have to shoot the girl.”
“What?!” It was so hard to stand. I leaned heavily on the thin wooden walls. Heard the wind howling through the cracks between the boards. “Are you joking again?”
“You are the one who told me this was necessary,” he said.
“Yeah, but maybe I was wrong,” I answered. The wall behind me felt strangely gritty. I scratched at it with my fingernails, and they came away black. I turned around and saw a charcoal smudge, roughly the shape of a man, burned into the wall right where I’d been leaning.
“You are frequently wrong,” he said, thinking. Then, “But I don’t think you are about this. I have reason for concern. The girl and I have been getting along much better lately.”
“You’re becoming friends, so you want to kill her?”
“She despised and feared me at first, which is a normal human response. Now, we have more in common. Taking the angels is changing her. The only wounds that slow her are the psychic ones she sustains from destroying the tools of the Mechanic.”
“Just call them angels,” I said. “Don’t spout that pretentious bullshit.”
Pretentious bullshit, my mind echoed.
Randall’s favorite phrase.
My heart hurt, for the few seconds I allowed it.
“Her recuperative period from those wounds is also growing shorter. Soon there will not be a window of weakness to exploit. We act now, or not at all.”
“Then not at all!” I said, too loudly. If felt like I tore something inside my skull.
“I understand you have feelings for the girl,” Zang said. “But to be fair, you have feelings for every girl we meet. These feelings, I believe, are a result of you confusing lust with genuine affection.”
Well, shit, Carey—he’s got you there.
“You promised me one thing: that we pursue and destroy Jie, no matter the cost. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” I snapped.
“Sometimes humans forget,” he said. “Perhaps your anger has faded over time. This also happens to humans. It does not happen to me. My anger is a remnant, the remainder of an emotion locked in place when the angels solved me. My anger does not waver. Does yours? Is it no longer important to you, to kill Jie for what she has done?”
Pretentious bullshit.
Snapshots of Randall bounced through my brain. The two of us in our first apartment, bored out of our skulls, throwing silverware at each other in a game we called “dodge the silverware.” Killing beers on the benches of Liberty Park in the middle of night, trading jokes about what we’d do to the Statue of Liberty if we could reach her. Stealing a whole hot dog cart because we hadn’t eaten in days—we were so hungry it seemed brilliant at the time. Twenty hot dogs later, less brilliant. Randall and his stupid fucking shirts. Randall, who all the girls liked better. Randall, being torn apart in an empty lot beneath a roller coaster.
“I still want her dead,” I said.
My chest had been fluttering seconds ago. Heart beating too fast, breath coming too shallow. Now I felt cold. And numb.
Hate doesn’t feel like passion. Hate feels like autopilot.
“I would do it for you, but…” Zang tried to gesture at Rosa, still immobile in the far corner. But he had no arms, so he just kind of tilted. Any other moment, I’d have laughed at him.
“You couldn’t do it anyway,” I said, pulling the Colt Navy revolver from the waistband of my jeans. “You have to give a shit about her for it to work.”
“Ah,” he said. “You already knew. You brought the gun.”
“I always bring the gun,” I said.
“Then you always knew,” he said.
And the asshole was right.
Rosa had taken half a dozen angels now. She stopped sleeping months ago. She hadn’t eaten anything in weeks. Maybe longer. Sometimes she talked like Zang—all formal and vacant—for a few seconds, before snapping out of it with her bashful little smile and laughing it all off.
I remembered being on that ramshackle plywood stage in the middle of a marsh in England. Watching Meryll touch a human being, and watching him practically fold inside out as he transformed into a bloody, screaming monstrosity.
Everything the angels touch turns to shit. She’ll turn to shit if you let her. Hell, maybe she’d even want you to do it. Maybe she’d forgive you, if she was awake.
But she wasn’t. And that’s about the only thing I’m grateful for. Means I didn’t have to look her in eye when I put a bullet through it.
TWENTY-SIX
}}}Carey. 1987. Los Angeles, California. West Hollywood.}}}}}}}}}
“Whoa, hold on, seriously?” Jell-O Jimmy paused while handing me the bottle. He narrowed his eyes, then took his arm back. Cradled the whiskey against him like a baby.
“What?” I said. “End of story. Pass the bottle.”
“Nah, no way,” Jimmy said.
We called him Jell-O because he was always jiggling a little bit. Thought it was the DTs at first, but no—he had some kind of brain disease. The shaking was just gonna get worse and worse, until he couldn’t even feed himself. So we called him Jell-O. Sure, it’s gallows humor, but when you’re actually up on the gallows, you just call it humor.
“The fuck you mean, no?” I said. I kicked the rusted-out shell of a little charcoal grill we were using as a fire pit. It shot sparks in the air. “What about the deal?”
“The deal,” Jimmy said, holding the bottle out, then yanking it back, “is you tell me stories and you get to share my hooch.”
“Right,” I said. “I finished this story. Gimme the bottle and I’ll start another one.”
“That ain’t finished!” he cried, jumping to his feet. The scratchy blue U-Haul moving blanket fell from around his shoulders. “Look, your stories are crazy bullshit, man. But why I like you—why you get to put your diseased lips on my bottle—is that they make sense. I can follow ’em. Larry the Lizardman, he thinks reptiles run the government, but when you talk to him about it, it don’t make sense. Jumps all over the place. Starts talking about his kids and radio waves and shit. Mary, that chick squats down in the ’ducts? She thinks we’re all really underground and there’s a bigger world around us, and our sky is its ground, but she clams up after that. Doesn’t like talking about it. Your crazy though, it’s entertaining because it almost sounds like stories. And stories have a proper ending.”
“But they’re not stories,” I said. I wasn’t so far gone that I babbled this stuff at the normals. That’s a sure way to get locked up. But why bother pretending with the other hobos? To them, I told the truth. “They’re my life.”
“Listen, man. Listen: took you two weeks to tell me about that other ninja chick, what’s her name?”
“Meryll,” I said. I hated saying it. It felt like I was stealing something.
“Right, that was a good story. This Rosa chick, she’s the same deal and you’re just like ‘we met, kicked some ass, then I killed her.’ That’s a shitty ending! She deserves a better story, so tell me a better one, or no bottle.”
He sat back down and gave me the snake eyes, the ones that say he’s putting his foot down. For real this time. And that means I’m going to have to fight him for that bottle. Sucker-punch an altogether pretty decent guy with a brain disease and then steal his liquor. Well, that, or go sober for the night.
I’m not going sober for the night.
“With Meryll,” I said, “that was her story. It was important to tell that one right, because it was about her, and who she was, and what this fight does to people. You had to understand her, so you’d know it was them that did it to her—she wasn’t some kinda monster. They are.”
“But it ain’t about that with Rosa? And the other one—the kid at the start, the one you tricked into coming outta the freezer. Why don’t they get the same treatment? We got time! All the time in the world! And I’m buying the hooch, so spin me those tales, man.”
“Rosa and the kid,” I said, chucking some more garbage onto the fire. “Those stories aren’t about them. They’re about me. You don’t have to understand me. I am a fucking monster.”
Jimmy didn’t have much to say about that. When folks get maudlin around here, it’s best to just shut up and let it play out. We sat there watching the toxic fire eat away the edges of a Styrofoam container. We listened to cars down on the 110 honk their horns—always that angry, too-long honk that ends in a fistfight or a gunshot. We pulled up little chunks of ice plant, squeezed the juice out of ’em, chucked them at nothing in particular.
I was just about to make my move: tell Jimmy the cops had pulled up, then when he looked away, wham! Right in the side of the head. Where the jaw hooks up to the skull. Always floors ’em. Grab the bottle before it spills, and find a new place to spend my nights. Then Jimmy held the whiskey out to me and said:
“All right. Finish your story, then. But I liked Rosa’s better.”
“Me too, man,” I said, and I took a drink.
TWENTY-SEVEN
}}}Kaitlyn. Unknown. Unknown.}}}}}}}}}
You’re inside of a dense fogbank that settled over downtown in a major city. Visibility is so beyond poor. The buildings right beside you are demarcated only by your memory of them. You just touched this one’s smooth brick walls. You took two steps away, and now it is gone. Just the echo of it, bouncing around your spatial cortex. You can feel this massive thing looming over you—you know for a fact that it’s just a few feet away—but strain as you might, you can’t actually see it. You may think you catch a detail here or there—a window ledge, a doorjamb, an awning—but you can’t be sure.
That’s what it’s like, being inside an angel. A featureless white void that still somehow seems crowded. Simultaneously vacant and impossibly dense. The first time I was here, I thought I’d stepped into the negative space between worlds. Pure, unbroken emptiness. But it’s a trick. That’s why the vertigo kicks in when you try to focus. Why you taste metal when you try to track one of those unnatural, churning shapes through the null space. Because this isn’t a null space at all.
Draw a number. Draw another over it. Another. Another. Repeat until you have an impenetrable black square. Show it to somebody else. Somebody that never knew there were numbers at all. They’ll see only a black square. And yet they’ll still get this unshakable feeling that there’s something more, if they could just scratch away a little bit of the surface.…
That’s what an angel really is: an infinitely dense intersection of information and energy. An extra-dimensional creature that can only be anchored in our plane of existence by crudely co-opting an intelligent being that belongs here—a parasite, hitching a ride through our universe on the drifting husk of our humanity. We only see that husk—the true creature is spread across an infinite number of dimensions. A billion billion angels spanning all of time and creation, at once independent and inextricably linked.
If you can just look through the white curtain, that impenetrable patina of information, you can see the bigger picture: one angel hooked to the next, each relaying their stolen energy up an infinite chain, branching again and again until it becomes a nest of writhing tentacles snaking through every possible dimension.
The siphonophore.
A network of individual creatures, all linked to form one larger one. Kill a part, so what? They’ll make another. That’s their strength.
But watching this angel shunt its constant stream of energy across the thin veil between universes, I get an idea. I follow it. It’s difficult: The energy isn’t broadcast in a single constant, unbroken stream from place to place. Some of it slips through the realm of possibility and into another angel, idling in a place very much like this one. It hovers over the rapidly disintegrating body of an old, bearded man, lying in a dark and partially collapsed lounge. Frenzied Empty Ones tear themselves apart with religious fervor; two frightened blind men crouch in the corner; my own body lies broken on the floor. In this dimension, there is no Zang in sight. Jie is victorious.
It’s just one minor difference—maybe in this dimension, Zang didn’t duck fast enough and Alvar took his head off; maybe he went to check on Carey first, figuring he had time; maybe he skipped away and got ice cream instead, who knows with that guy?—but even the slightest split kick-starts an entirely different chain of events. One which takes place in a brand new and wholly distinct dimension. The angel here redirects some of its own energy to yet another dimension, but this one is nothing like ours: A small ball of light floats, silent, in abyssal space. There are no planets here. Nothing breaks the black expanse but a sick and dying star in the distance. This angel is not siphoning any energy at all, only using what it receives from the others. A small portion it consumes just to continue existing in this world—this place with no life to anchor—but it funnels the rest right into that sun. Sustaining its reaction. Fighting th
e tide of entropy.
The siphonophore feeds off of life, but with an infinite number of possible dimensions, life is comparatively rare. So many things had to go just right for us to be here. One degree off at a crucial period of development, and primitive single-cell organisms would never have emerged. An asteroid collides with a single piece of dust a million light years away, altering its course ever so slightly, and the impact wipes out ancient mammals. Or one man says the wrong thing at a secret meeting in the back of a Russian hotel, and we wipe ourselves out with nuclear winter.
Life is fragile. Life is rare.
And the siphonophore is hungry.
It uses some of what it steals from us, and all the permutations of us, to sow new life in barren universes. It will take millions of years to pay off, but that’s okay: Time is meaningless to the siphonophore. Time is meaningless to everything not trapped within its confines, like insects in amber.
I leave this solitary angel and its dying sun, and I follow the chain up further—angels riding the remnants of aboriginal farmers, slick politicians, housewives, professional bodybuilders, homeless junkies, and child soldiers. Infinite lives in infinite dimensions, all corrupted and stolen.
Much like the link, that’s their strength. Their food source is also their breeding ground. It’s a feedback loop.
Much like the link, it’s also their greatest weakness.
The humans they use as their vessels can’t be solved completely. The angels have to leave little pieces—useless memories, meaningless impulses, trivial desires—of the host, in order to use them as anchors. The angels think of this as little more than celestial garbage. They think those little remnants of humanity are harmless to them.
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