by Susan Ee
“Me.”
Until I say it, I hadn’t really believed it.
At least they don’t laugh. But they stare at me for an uncomfortable amount of time.
I shrug. It’s awkward talking about yourself. “I know more about angels than just about anyone else alive. I have an . . .” I remember I don’t have Pooky Bear anymore. “I’ve made friends with . . .” Who? Raffe? The Watchers? They’re going to hunt us like animals. “Anyway, I have one hell of a family.”
“You have brains, and you have a family,” says a man with a gash on his head. “That’s your special power?”
“We can all go our separate ways and die alone.” My voice becomes firm, and I try to inject steel into it. “Or we can stay together and make our final stand.”
Whether I want to or not, I’m going to lead what’s left of Obi’s Resistance.
“Instead of scattering and hiding, we’re going to work together. The healthy and strong will help anyone who has trouble moving. We’ll collect as many boats and planes as we can, and we’ll begin getting people across the bay as soon as possible. We need volunteers to drive the boats and help get everybody across.”
I doubt that there are any planes available and, if there are, that anyone will be brave enough to take to the air while there are angels around. But some of these people might know how to pilot a boat.
“We can’t get everyone across before sunset,” says someone in the crowd.
“You’re right,” I say. “We’re going to keep ferrying them for as long as it takes, because some of us will create a diversion and keep the angels occupied.”
“Who’s going to do that?”
I think about that for a minute before answering.
“Heroes.”
IT DOESN’T TAKE long for people to decide whether to stick around and help or to take off and take their chances solo. A third of the people leave after they hear me in the yard. But the rest stay, and that even includes some able-bodied people who could have left.
The healthy ones who stay behind help the injured into cars. Even if they can’t be moved very far, we need to move them out of here, because this is the first place the angels will come tonight.
We’ll have to leave the dead behind. That bothers me more than I can say. Even the Fallen managed to give Beliel a burial ceremony.
“How far away is the fire?” I ask the twins as we walk into the adobe-style building that Obi used as his headquarters.
“The south end of Mountain View was starting to get smoky when we left,” says Dee. “We can check out the surveillance videos and see how far it’s gone.”
Surveillance videos.
“Can we make an announcement through the surveillance system?”
The twins shrug. “We could probably make an announcement through the laptops and cell phones that we use as cameras. We’d have to talk to the engineers to make sure, though.”
“Are any of them still here?”
“They never left the computer room,” says Dee.
“Can you get them to set that up? Let’s get the word out,” I say as we walk down the hallway to the computer room. “People need to know what’s going on.”
The computer room is cluttered with piles of portable solar panels, cables, cell phones, tablets, laptops, and batteries of all sizes and shapes. The trash can is overflowing with empty instant-noodle packages and energy-bar wrappers. Half a dozen engineers look up as Dee-Dum begins explaining what happened in the school yard.
“We know,” says one bleary-eyed guy wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Godzilla crushing Tokyo. “We watched it through the cameras around the yard. A couple of the guys left, but the rest of us want to help. What can we do?”
“You guys are the best,” says Dee.
It doesn’t take long before the engineers are ready for me to make an announcement. As the last of the camp abandons Paly High, we record my speech so that they can loop the message.
“The angels are coming at sunset tonight,” I say into the mic. “They’re hunting as many people as they can. The south end of the peninsula has been cut off by fire. I repeat, the south end of the peninsula has been cut off by fire. Go to the Golden Gate Bridge—we’re sending people there to help you cross. If you’re willing and able, come to the East Bay Bridge to distract the angels and give the others a chance at life. We could use all the fighters we can get.”
I take a deep breath. “For you gang members out there—how long do you think you can last on your own? We could use some good street soldiers.” It hits me that I sound like Obi. “We’re all on the same side. What’s the point of you surviving today when tomorrow they’ll just come and wipe you guys out? Why not band together and have a real shot? At the very least, let’s go out with a bang and show them what we’re made of. Come join the fight at the Bay Bridge.”
I steel my voice. “Angels, if you’re listening, everyone will know you’re shameful cowards if you go after the helpless ones. There would be no glory in that, and you’ll just embarrass yourselves during the blood hunt. The real fight will be at the East Bay Bridge. Everyone worth fighting will be there, and I promise we’ll have a good show for you. I challenge you to come find us.”
I pause, not sure how to end it. “This is Penryn Young, Daughter of Man, Killer of Angels.”
That phrase, Daughter of Man, will always remind me of my time with Raffe. Raffe, who will be hunting all of us tonight along with his buddies who I thought could be my friends too. But that’s like a child expecting a hungry lion to be her fuzzy pet instead of being her killer.
I think I sounded confident, but my hands feel frozen and my breath comes out trembly.
“Ooh, I like the killer of angels title,” says Dum, nodding.
“Are you sure this will work?” asks Dee with a frown. “If they go after the Golden Gate—”
“They won’t,” I say. “I know them. They’ll come where the fight is.”
“She knows them, man,” says Dum. “It’s cool. They’ll come after us at the Bay Bridge.” He nods, then frowns as the implications hit him. “Wait a minute . . .”
“Are you sure that people will listen?” I ask.
“Oh, they’ll listen,” says Dee. “If there’s one thing that us humans are good at, it’s gossip. Word spreads—and everybody’s heard of you.”
“They’ve heard of your mom and sister too,” says Dum. “But that’s another story.”
“They’ll come,” says Dee. “You’re the only leader we’ve got.”
I GET INTO an SUV big enough to have two backseats. I slide into the back and notice the soft leather, the tinted windows, the first-class stereo. Things we took for granted that we’ll never have again.
Paige is flying in the arms of one of her three locusts, while Mom is riding on a bus with a bunch of cult members who swear they had nothing to do with my kidnapping. I don’t know what to make of them, but if I were going to worry about the safety of anyone on that bus, it’d be them, not my mom.
My recorded announcement tells people that we have a plan. But we don’t, not really. All we know is that some of us will distract the angels at the Bay Bridge while everyone else crosses the channel spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge.
I squeeze into the backseat with the last remaining members of the old council that Obi was putting together. One is a woman who managed global distribution for Apple, and the other is an ex-military guy who calls himself the Colonel.
The Colonel keeps throwing suspicious glances at me. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t believe a word of the wild stories going around about me. And even if any of it is true, he still thinks I’m a “mass hallucination preying on the desperate hopes of the people.”
But he’s here to help as best he can, and that’s all I can ask for. I just wish he’d stop giving me those looks that remind me that he
could be right.
Doc and Sanjay slide into the seats behind us. It’s not surprising that the two of them get along since they’re both researchers. Sanjay seems to have no worries about being seen with Doc.
The two council members objected to Doc being here, but no one else has Doc’s knowledge of angels and monsters. Doc’s bruises look just as bad as the last time I saw him, but there are no fresh ones. People are too busy surviving to mess with him right now.
The twins slide into the driver’s and passenger’s seat in front of us. They have newly dyed blue hair. It’s not entirely blue but streaked and splotched over their blond as if they didn’t have enough time to do it right.
“What’s up with your hair?” I ask. “Aren’t you worried you’ll be spotted by angels flying above with all that blue?”
“War paint,” says Dee, fastening his seatbelt.
“Except it’s in our hair instead of on our faces,” says Dum, starting the engine. “Because we’re original like that.”
“Besides, are poisonous frogs worried about being spotted by birds?” asks Dee. “Are poisonous snakes? They all have bright markings.”
“You’re a poisonous frog now?” I ask.
“Ribbit.” He turns and flicks out his tongue at me. It’s blue.
My eyes widen. “You dyed your tongue too?”
Dee smiles. “Nah. It’s just Gatorade.” He lifts up a bottle half-full of blue liquid. “Gotcha.” He winks.
“‘Hydrate or Die,’ man,” says Dum as we turn onto El Camino Real.
“That’s not Gatorade’s marketing,” says Dee. “It’s for some other brand.”
“Never thought I’d say this,” says Dum, “but I actually miss ads. You know, like ‘Just Do It.’ I never realized how much of life’s good advice came from ads. What we really need now is for some industrious soul to put out a product and give us a really excellent saying to go with it. Like ‘Kill ’Em All and Let God Sort ’Em Out.’”
“That’s not an advertising jingle,” I say.
“Only because it wasn’t good advice back in the day,” says Dum. “Might be good advice now. Attach a product to it, and we could get rich.” He turns and arches a brow at his brother, who turns and arches an identical eyebrow back.
“So does anyone have a good survival strategy, or is there no hope for getting out of this nightmare?” asks the Colonel.
“We came up with a big, fat zero. I don’t know how we’re going to survive the blood hunt,” says Dee.
“That wasn’t the nightmare I was referring to,” says the Colonel. “Death by stupid comments is what I was talking about.”
The twins look at each other and make an O with their mouths like little boys telling each other they’ve been busted.
I grin in spite of it all. It’s good to know I can still smile, if only a little.
Then we get down to business.
“What’s going on with that angel plague you were working on, Doc? Any chance we could go pandemic on their asses?” asks Dee.
He shakes his head. “It’ll take at least a year, assuming that we could get it to work. We don’t know anything about their physiology and don’t have anyone to test it on. But if we’re lucky, it’ll take a few of them out soon anyway.”
“How?” asks the Colonel.
“The angels were creating another beast for the apocalypse,” says Doc. “The instructions were very specific. It had to have seven heads that were a mix of animals.”
“The sixer?” I ask. “Yeah, I saw it.”
“If it has seven heads, why do you call it a sixer?” asks Sanjay.
“It has the number six-six-six tattooed on its foreheads.”
Dum looks at me with a horrified expression.
“The angels called it the beast,” says Doc. “But I like your sixers name better.”
“The seventh head was human, and it was dead,” I say.
“Was the sixer alive?” asks Doc. “Did any of the angels around it look sick?”
“Oh, it was definitely alive. I didn’t notice anybody looking sick. But then again, I wasn’t looking at them. Why?”
“We had three of them.”
“There are three of those things?”
“All variations of each other. With that many animals mixed together in one body, things are bound to go wrong. At the same time they were making them, Laylah, the lead physician, was working on an apocalyptic plague. It was supposed to be for us humans, but there was a lot of experimentation to make it as gruesome as possible. Somehow, one of the strains got passed on to the sixers.”
I remember Uriel talking to Laylah in his suite before the last aerie party. He was pressuring her pretty hard to cut corners and make the apocalypse happen faster. I’m guessing she’s been cutting corners all along to meet his demands.
“The sixers infected the angel doctors. They got sick, then about a day or two later, they were exposed to the sixers again, and that massively accelerated the disease. They bled out in the most horrible way. It looked excruciatingly painful too. It was everything they were trying to do with a human disease, only it killed angels and locusts instead. The human lab workers were fine, and so were the sixers. They were just carriers of the disease.”
“Do you have one in a cage somewhere?” I ask.
“The infected sixers were all killed. I was ordered to dispose of the bodies. Angels don’t do dirty work like that. Before I burned them, though, I managed to sneak two vials of their blood. I used one to infect the new batch of sixers that they created. I was hoping it might cause some random damage.”
“Did it?” I ask, thinking about Raffe even now.
“I don’t know. After the accident, they separated the projects to avoid further contamination, so I lost track of it.”
“What did you do with the second vial of blood?”
“I kept it for study. That’s what we’ve been using to try to come up with an angel plague.”
“But no luck?” I ask.
“Not yet,” says Doc. “Not for a long time to come.”
“Time we don’t have,” says the Colonel. “Next idea.”
Our goal is easy to identify—we need to come up with a way to survive the onslaught tonight. But we just talk in circles, trying to figure out how to do it. For all we know, we could be the only freedom fighters showing up at the Bay Bridge.
As we drive up the peninsula, we talk.
And talk.
And talk some more.
I’m trying not to yawn, but it’s not easy. It feels like it’s been a week since I slept.
“The angels might not even know which bridge is the East Bay Bridge,” says the Colonel. “We need a lure or something that will attract them away from the Golden Gate.”
“What kind of a lure?” asks Dee.
“Should we dangle little babies from the bridge?” asks Dum.
“Sadly, that’s not funny,” says Doc.
I rub my forehead. I’m usually not prone to headaches, but all this desperate talk of coming up with a plan is killing me. I’m not really the planning type.
My eyes drift to the window, and I become mesmerized by the drone of the adult voices in the car and my own sleepiness.
We’re driving along the bay as we head north to San Francisco. The water sparkles like a field of diamonds waiting to be picked if only you could reach in with magic hands and grab them.
The wind picks up, floating leaves and trash by the side of the road. I don’t remember seeing trash by the freeway in the World Before, but a lot has changed since then.
My eyes lazily follow a piece of paper as it flitters across the road. It dances in the breeze, floating up and down, then pirouetting on the wind. It lands in the water, causing a ripple of sparkles around it.
In my half-dreaming state, it looks lik
e one of the twins’ talent show flyers.
“Come one, come all to the greatest show of all.” Isn’t that what the flyer says?
I can see the twins standing on an apple crate, wearing striped suits and hats like barkers at a carnival. They’re calling to the ragged refugees. “Step right up, folks. This will be the biggest fireworks show in history. There’ll be bangs, there’ll be screams, there’ll be popcorn! This is your last chance—your last chance to show off your amazing talents.”
Then it all comes together.
I sit up, as wide awake as if I’d been zapped by my mother’s cattle prod. I blink twice, tuning back in to the conversation. Sanjay is saying something about wishing he knew more about the angels’ physiology.
“The talent show.” I look at the twins with wide eyes. “Who could resist a talent show?”
Everyone looks at me as if I’m nuts. That puts a slow grin on my face.
BY THE TIME we arrive at Golden Gate, it’s noon. We have about six hours until sunset.
The famous bridge is in shambles like all the other bridges around the bay. Several of the suspension cables swing in the air, tethered only at the top. It’s broken in four sections, with a big chunk missing just past the middle. One of the sections leans precariously, and I wonder how long it’ll be before it falls.
The last time I saw the Golden Gate, I was flying in Raffe’s arms.
The wind chills me as I get out of our SUV, the salty air tasting like tears.
A meager group of people mill about by the water’s edge beneath the bridge, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. I didn’t expect thousands of people, but I was hoping that more would be here.
“We’re the ones who rescued the people off Alcatraz,” Dee shouts. He acts as if there are hundreds of people here. “You’ve heard of that, right? Those same boats are coming here. When they arrive, do what you can to help. It’s the nice thing to do.”
“If you’re not inclined to do the nice thing,” says Dum, “then meet us at Bay Bridge. Let’s show the angels what we’re made of!”
