With cool precision Brown reached into his pants and produced a short, hooked knife. Behind and below the human ear, the bodyguard knew, were important nerve bundles.
The great auriculum relayed impulses controlling many facial muscles. When cut, a victim’s face would be forced to take on the slack, dull expression.
Brown thought it appropriate for the current circumstance.
A whistling sound bounced off of the fine china plates in their display cabinet as the knife lanced into the bundle of nerves and blood vessels at the edge of the Oklahoman’s ratty beard. Bright arterial blood arched into the air and splashed loudly on the kitchen counters. This man that Brown had always disliked opened his eyes in shock.
The tobacco-stained mouth hung dumbly slack.
A gurgling gasp issued forth as the crimson incision yawned and started to pour. One hand clamped over the wound in a vain attempt to stop the deluge of blood. The other clawed the air, trying to grab onto Brown. The knife flashed again, and a deep rent opened on the man’s wrist.
More blood.
It pooled now, enough that the bounty hunter slipped. With a clumsy thud, he crashed down into the puddle of himself and finished bleeding out.
All the while his eyes affixed on Brown’s in a sort of astonished displeasure.
The Brazilian met his gaze with a grim smile, which curled into a frown as the stink of the dying uncontrolled bowels filled the room.
Eventually, the blood stopped coming and the dead body stared at him. Unmoving eyes incredulous even in death.
A pall of silence fell over the kitchen as Brown contemplated what to do with all three corpses. His frenetic senses took in the quiet trickle of final circulation that added their best to the spreading pool around the bounty hunter.
The other two bodies ignored their new company.
The presence of cadavers didn’t bother Brown. He had always found the dead fascinating.
For now, his thoughts were too pre-occupied with his former co-worker and current prey. Serena would come here eventually, to her former home base.
He was sure of it.
Brown moved to the refrigerator. With fevered fingers he pulled out leftovers and soda before moving to the table. Careful to avoid soiling his shoes in the spreading pool of blood from his victim, he sat down and began to eat.
He could wait for the woman.
He must wait.
Upon her arrival, he would make it worth his while.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Morning in Las Vegas was ugly.
It always was.
The light shone brown and tan and yellow. Erstwhile-neon buildings stood unremarkable gray and black and silver. Such drabness served as another testament to the reason Hunter Valdez was partial to dark hours.
The crowd gathered in the courtyard of Babel was enormous. Larger even than Valdez had anticipated. Thousands filled the space, shoulder to shoulder and full of stirring angst.
Among the crowd were some few that the others would not press against. Little islands in the sea of people.
Valdez focused on these.
Here it was a woman, dressed in the everyday colors of a housewife. Normal as could be, save for her flexing wings and plumage of a deep crimson. At the edge of the crowd was another, a young man in leather and jeans. Two more men earned an even wider berth, dressed as they were in the rags of jumpsuits from Clark County Jail. They stalked through the crowds uninterrupted.
Hunter’s perfect pearly white teeth shined in a grin swelling with genuine pleasure. Just as he thought, there were more like him, like Brown.
Many more.
The milling masses waited for something.
For him.
He had asked for this gathering. Using his considerable influence with the functional media, Valdez had put out public service announcements offering sanctuary, security, and guidance to anyone willing to be pressed into service at one of his many properties.
Of course, the centerpiece of his empire, his crowning achievement, would serve as ground zero for all of the operations he planned. The panicked masses hardly needed encouragement.
They came in droves, hoping for a handout or a hand up from one of the world’s wealthiest men.
So he observed the throng now knocking at his door, deciding he would be selective as usual. Most all of these frightened and desperate fools would be turned away before they ever set foot inside his masterpiece.
Hunter laughed at the coincidence. That had been his plan all along. To exclude the average and below average.
Now that he and so many others were transformed -had been given a purpose- only the truly extraordinary would be allowed into Babel.
They were there, the housewives and the inmates and the bikers that would make up his troops. Of course they would follow his orders. Those who refused would be bent to his will or be eliminated from the equation.
Changed though the world was, some things remained the same.
Hunter Valdez belonged at the top of the heap, and so there he would remain.
Since his attempted suicide, and the miraculous moment in which he had rescued himself, Hunter had required no sleep. The need for rest had seemingly been replaced by an increased dependence on food. The trade-off pleased him. It afforded him more time to think, to plan, and to discover and perfect the new and interesting things that his body was capable of.
For days, he had taken in the endless streams of information coming from all over the world. He had drawn conclusions, and sent out feelers.
It was clear to him that the changes and catastrophes were only an evolution of the segregation that had been building for years. Civilized, modernized, worldly, and progressive individuals like himself who had abandoned the outdated moral and religious paradigms in favor of a more gratifying lifestyle stood on one side.
The old school -those guilt-ridden and afflicted by irrational fears of sin and impossible divine retribution- stood on the other.
Valdez chuckled darkly to himself. There was no question which side carried more strength in numbers. After that first news report, he had seen perhaps a hundred more, a repetitive slide show of panic and mass hysteria.
Interspersed here and there had been footage of so-called miracles. Angelic beings swooping in to save the day, to put out fires or put an end to an assault. Those scenes had crushed Valdez’s smile and his mood. Each time he saw them he would thrash about his rooms in impotent rage. Anyone unfortunate enough to be present -and unintelligent enough to stay- had borne the brunt of his anger.
It was during these fits that he had discovered the strange things he could do with his hands. He wondered how many of the thousands below him in the courtyard could to the same.
Hunter Valdez smiled at the thought of it.
Turning his attention away from the buzzing crowds, the Prince of Las Vegas cast his eyes out over the city. Lazy columns of smoke and ash still rose at intervals. How many of those fires had been started by the throng below him? The desire to know was more than simple curiosity. He actually needed to know. Only the strong would be able to help him.
Only those whose change had been as profound as his own. Or nearly so.
Hunter Valdez didn’t worry. Worry was against his nature. Nearly all things could be solved through a simple process of elimination, weeding out the weak.
The prospects were exciting.
Beneath furrowed brows, Valdez’s dark eyes sparkled with anticipation.
His worldly fortunes afforded him virtually unlimited resources, so he had called for his own brand of help. They had come. Many of them, with still more on the way. Hundreds, maybe thousands ran or drove or even flew to answer his beckoning.
To join his army.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Serena didn’t like the look of her parents’ house when she pulled up in the white pickup she and Haley had commandeered from the ghost town. Most of the day had been wasted trying to navigate their way up the thrashed interstat
e to Salt Lake City.
After much debate, they had opted to leave the witch woman in the desert. Serena thought it better to kill her, but the good doctor had talked her out of it.
Instead, Serena broke her arms and her legs with a pipe wrench.
Haley had cried at that, but then, she hadn’t seen the horror the Bruja had meted upon the poor town of Hurricane inside that store.
Using every restraint they could find; the pair of them taped, tied, and chained the witch to one of the lonely fence posts next to the school. Oddly, her wings hadn’t been an issue. Somehow they had gone missing, vanished as if they’d never sprouted, just like Serena’s.
Neither she nor the veterinarian knew what to make of it.
It was odd enough that the wings had appeared in the first place, so their disappearance wasn’t nearly the shock that it might have been.
Given the extent of her injuries, and the parched landscape, it seemed unlikely the Bruja would make it more than a few days. Still, Serena was unsatisfied with the decision. It would have been much better to ensure that such a volatile loose end be tied up. Her friend’s compassion for the vile woman was difficult to understand, given what the two of them had seen and experienced since the unfolding events had begun. The Bruja was a mass murderer, and an apparent Devil worshiper.
Is that kind of person worthy of mercy?
Serena thought not, and that thought scared her.
The usual tiredness that accompanied long road trips was absent from Serena’s limbs and lower back but she no longer wondered why.
She had gradually come to embrace the dreamlike changes that her fevers had brought on. Clearly, there was something miraculous happening, and her run-in with the Bruja had revealed to her a sort of intrinsic purpose. For the first time in her life, she didn’t doubt the decisions she was making.
Like tonight, her usual intuition would have led her immediately to her son, especially after so many failed attempts to contact Aaron and Danny by phone.
The collapse of the world’s wireless networks had probably set communications back more than fifty years.
Still, for some reason she didn’t feel overly anxious to get to her boy. He would be safe with his father. He always had been.
Serena decided it was more pressing that she check on her parents. They were getting on in years, and the stress of their return trip had no doubt worn on them.
Of course her father, grizzled and tough, would also be wondering how his little girl was holding up. She almost allowed herself a moment of laughter at the image of him wrinkled and limping, fretting for her safety. Not knowing that she was now superhuman.
The house was dark as she approached. Almost all of the houses around the neighborhood were. Not because of power outages, though she had passed many of those on the drive here.
The streetlights in this neighborhood shone bright.
Turning to look across the valley, Serena noticed that a large portion of the grid appeared to be intact. The firefly shine of moving traffic was oddly sporadic. Only the most urgent errands were important enough to draw folks away from their comfort zones and into the uncertainty outside.
The largest sections of darkness pooled in the western reach of the city.
Sad, that even in a time like this the economic disadvantages of the rougher neighborhoods could be so obvious. She struggled to reconcile her selfish need to aide her own family and the desire to make a greater impact. What else could she do though? Hadn’t she and the doctor done at least a small part in apprehending the witch woman and making sure she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else?
Who am I kidding?
Serena promised herself that after today, after she checked her parents and her son, she would do more. She had to, she knew it. All of these things that she was now capable of; the strength and fearlessness, the healing powers all dictated that she must try harder. The wings…
Wings.
She was sure that these things were gifts, and they had apparently been reserved for a select few. Why me?
It was a question that she had no answer for. It wasn’t her choice, but it was a blessing not to be squandered.
She would do more.
First though, Mom and Dad needed to be checked on.
Serena felt almost like an animal, the way her nose was now the first of her senses to tell her something was wrong.
Ever since she was a young girl, home had smelled like cinnamon.
Her mother was obsessed with it. Candles and air sprays and scented oils, all of them cinnamon.
Not today.
Wafting under the closed door as she approached was another odor. Not nearly so pleasant.
The rose bushes bracketing the front walk needed trimming, and their leaves shivered just enough to echo Serena’s rising panic. Her newly-acute hearing strained to pick up something through the door. Any telltale sound that would put her mind at ease and make her irrational worry seem silly. The windows were all blinded, curtains and shutters closed, so pinpoint vision did her no good. Hair stood on end, and with the rising alarm, her wings reappeared and flexed backward alertly.
The feathers were beautiful in the waning daylight. The frown on her face was not.
Inside the house, Brown sat at the kitchen table, struggling to understand why Americans enjoyed cows’ milk on their breakfast cereals. Despite all of his years in the States, he couldn’t quite sympathize with many tastes…
He had just finished munching the bulk of what was left in the pantry. Washing down a can of Pringles with water, avoiding the dairy. Slowly, Brown was finding a way to balance his hunger, to somehow sate his ravenous desire by pacing his eating, and his exertion. Still, he found himself irritable and agitated.
Luckily, with the unwelcome stirring of his brain came this newly-minted body. He didn’t mind the trade. Especially now, when he could feel the approach of his enemy. It was not a function of any traditional perception, not vision or audition. He simply felt her quickened heartbeat, sensed her rising alarm. Maybe scented the bile that rose imperceptibly in the back of her throat at the thought of what she might now find.
Serena Dayne was there, on the other side of the door. Wondering no doubt about the darkened windows. It was a technique he had used so many times before. Making a place that should be comforting into a menace. Brown always enjoyed the effect. Keys sliding tentatively into a friendly lock, the tiptoe step on the welcome mat, wide doe eyes straining into the shadows for ghosts that were not there.
Scared of home.
He chuckled softly at the thought, relishing for once the images that danced through his fevered brain. The sound was ugly, and his companions, still and gray on the kitchen floor, did not laugh with him.
Ever so faintly, Serena heard what sounded like a laugh. Like the sinister response to an inside joke. It carried the same fundamental wrongness that the dread wind from this morning had. Though simple and short, the dull notes were rife with madness.
Serena loathed the sound.
Her father didn’t laugh like that, and of course neither did her mother. Those simple few seconds of sound were the tones of a stranger. An intruder
She kicked the door off its hinges.
The scene that greeted her was beyond horrible.
Whatever this miracle was that had changed her only went so far, only armored her to a certain extent. In the split second required to take in the tableau of her parents’ kitchen, Serena froze. Froze, and hoped that the emotional wounds opened by what she was seeing would close as easily as the cuts and scrapes of the fight with the Bruja had.
Brown was there, inexplicably seated at the table in the attitude of a dinner guest. Dirty dishes and food wrappers trailed across the wood surface and onto the floor.
God, the floor.
The characteristic red-black of blood pooled thickly on the hardwood, trailing off to sponge in the carpet.
Her mother had always loved soft carpet…
Now she lay on
a tarp, like a freshly-hunted animal. The weight she had gained with age settled underneath her awkwardly so her final rest appeared uncomfortable. Serena’s father was right next to her, arms folded haphazardly over his left hip.
Serena wished, through the tears that sprung into her vision, that they were touching one another. It seemed wrong that they be motionless, only inches apart, but not embracing in death.
She tried not to notice the Cyclops eye of a bullet wound they each wore on their foreheads.
Near their feet was another stranger. He wore jeans that would have been dirty even if they weren’t soaked in blood. Most of the mess seemed to originate from this man’s head. The posture of this body was different, face down, like he’d fallen and stayed as opposed to being placed. All three of them were dead.
My parents are dead.
The slow-motion moment ended. She turned her eyes to the Brazilian. Nothing had changed since the last time she’d seen him in black and white on the security tapes at Babel. Same sweat-slick complexion. Same tenseness of the shoulders. Same menacing posture. Now though, he wore a satisfied smile. The ugliest smile Serena Dayne had ever seen.
He spoke, and she heard that subtle slithery accent.
“Very predictable Ms. Dayne.”
That was all. His face twisted into a mask of fury as he leapt at her. It was not a huge distance, the stretch of carpet and kitchen that separated the two of them, but it was much farther than a man could jump. Serena saw the chocolate-hued feathers spread behind his head as he came toward her.
Him too?
The moment of observation cost her dearly.
Brown bowled into her chest with crushing force. Momentum carried them through the double panes of the front room picture window. A million tiny shattered prisms exploded out over the bushes and onto the front lawn, reflecting the passage of two furious angels.
Serena expected to land hard on the grass. Instead, gravity failed, and she never made it there.
Brown gripped her under her armpits and they whooshed out over the street. She clamped down on his throat as hard as she could, but he had been a very hard man, and whatever he was now was even more steely.
To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1) Page 29
