by Ee, Susan
His black hair is plastered to his forehead. I try to get him to swallow some pills and drink some water but I can’t wake him enough to do anything. He just lies there like a burning piece of rock, totally unresponsive.
“If you don’t drink this water, I’m just going to leave you here to die alone.”
His bandaged back moves up and down serenely, just as it’s been doing for the last two days.
I’ve been out four times looking for Mom. But I haven’t gone far, always afraid the angel would wake while I was gone and I would miss my chance to find Paige before he died on me. Crazy women can sometimes fend for themselves on the streets, while wheelchair-bound little girls never can. So each time, I rushed back from my search for Mom, relieved and frustrated to find the angel still unconscious.
For two days, I’ve been mostly sitting around eating instant noodles while my sister….
I can’t bear to think about what’s happening to her, if for no other reason than my sheer lack of imagination as to what angels would want with a human child. It couldn’t be enslavement. She can’t walk. I shut down those thoughts. I will not think about what may be happening or what may already have happened. I just need to focus on finding her.
The anger and frustration swamp me. All I want to do is throw a tantrum like a two-year-old. I’m overwhelmed by a strong urge to hurl my glass of water at the wall, tear down the bookshelves, and scream my head off. The urge is so strong my hand starts to tremble, and the water in the glass shakes, threatening to spill.
Instead of hurling the glass against the wall, I throw the water on the angel. I want to smash the glass after it, but I hold back.
“Wake up, damn you. Wake up! What are they doing to my sister? What do they want with her? Where the hell is she?” I scream at the top of my lungs, knowing I could be bringing on street gangs and not caring.
I kick the couch for good measure.
To my utter amazement, his eyes open blearily. Deep blue eyes glare at me. “Can you keep it down? I’m trying to sleep.” His voice is raw and full of pain, but somehow, he still manages to inject a certain level of condescension.
I drop down on my knees to look directly into his face. “Where did the other angels go? Where did they take my sister?”
He deliberately closes his eyes.
I slap his back with everything I’ve got, right where the bandages are bloodied.
His eyes fly open, his teeth gritting. He hisses through his teeth but he doesn’t cry out in pain. Wow, does he look pissed off. I resist the urge to take a step back.
“You don’t scare me.” I say in my coldest voice, trying to tamp down the fear. “You’re too weak to even stand, you’re practically bled out, and without me, you’d already be dead. Tell me where they took her.”
“She’s dead,” he says with absolute finality. Then he closes his eyes as though going back to sleep.
I could swear my heart stops beating for a minute. My fingers feel like they’re freezing. Then my breath comes back to me in a painful heave.
“You’re lying. You’re lying.”
He doesn’t respond. I grab the old blanket that I left on the desk.
“Look at me!” I unroll the blanket onto the floor. The torn wings come tumbling out of it. Rolled up, they compressed to a tiny fraction of their wing span. The feathers almost seem to have disappeared. As they tumble out of the blanket, the wings partially open, and the fine down lifts as if stretching after a long nap.
I imagine that the horror in his eyes would be exactly like that of a human’s if he saw his own amputated legs rolling out of that moth-eaten blanket. I know I’m being unforgivably cruel, but I don’t have the luxury of being nice, not if I ever want to see Paige alive again.
“Recognize these?” I hardly recognize my own voice. It’s cold and hard. The voice of a mercenary. The voice of a torturer.
The wings have lost their sheen. There is still a hint of golden highlights in the snowy feathers, but some of the feathers are broken and sticking out at odd angles. Also, blood is splattered and congealed all over the wings, making the feathers clump and shrivel.
“If you help me find my sister, you can have these back. I saved them for you.”
“Thanks,” he croaks, surveying the wings. “They’ll look great on my wall.” Bitterness tinges his voice, but something else is also there. A tiny bit of hope, maybe.
“Before you and your buddies destroyed our world, there used to be doctors who could attach a finger or a hand back onto you if it happened to be cut off.” I don’t mention anything about refrigeration or the usual need to reattach a body part within hours of being severed. He’ll probably die anyway and none of this will matter.
The tense muscle in his jaw still stands out on his cold face, but his eyes warm just a fraction, as if he can’t help but think of the possibilities.
“I didn’t cut these off you,” I say. “But I can help you get them back. If you’ll help me find my sister.”
As an answer, he closes his eyes and appears to fall asleep.
He breathes deeply and heavily, just like a person in deep sleep. But he doesn’t heal like a person. When I dragged him in here, his face was black, blue, and swelling. Now, after almost two full days of sleeping, his face is back to normal. The dent from his broken ribs has disappeared. The bruises around his cheeks and eyes are gone, and the numerous cuts and marks on his hands, shoulders, and chest are completely healed.
The only things that haven’t healed are the wounds where his wings used to be. I can’t tell if they’re better through the bandages, but since they’re still bleeding, they’re probably not much better than they were two days ago.
I pause for a moment, thinking through my options. If I can’t bribe him, I’ll have to torture it out of him. I’m determined to do what it takes to keep my family alive, but I don’t know if I can go that far.
But he doesn’t have to know that.
Now that he’s awake, I had better make sure I can keep him under control. I head out to see if I can find something to hold him.
CHAPTER 7
When I walk out of the corner office, I find that the dead man in the foyer has been messed with. He seems to have lost all dignity since the last time I saw him.
Someone has arranged for one hand to be propped on his hip while the other hand reaches up to his hair. His long, shaggy hair has been spiked as though electrocuted, and his mouth is smeared drunkenly with lipstick. His eyes are wide open with black felt lines radiating like sun rays from his eyes. In the middle of his chest, a kitchen knife that wasn’t there an hour ago sticks out like a flagpole. Someone stabbed a dead body for reasons only the insane can fathom.
My mother has found me.
My mother’s condition is not as consistent as some might think. The intensity of her insanity waxes and wanes with no predictable schedule or trigger. Of course, it doesn’t help that she’s off her meds. When it’s good, people might not guess there’s anything wrong with her. Those are the days when the guilt of my anger and frustration toward her eat away at me. When it’s bad, I might walk out of my room to find a dead-man-turned-toy on the floor.
To be fair, she has never played with corpses before, at least, not that I’ve seen. Before the world fell apart, she’d always been on the edge and often several steps beyond it. But my dad’s desertion, then later the attacks, intensified everything. Whatever rational part of her that had been holding her back from diving into the darkness simply dissolved.
I think about burying the body, but a cold part of my mind tells me that this is still the best deterrent I could have. Any sane person who looks through the glass doors would run far, far away. We now play a permanent game of I-am-crazier-and-scarier-than-you. And in that game, my mother is our secret weapon.
I walk cautiously toward the bathrooms where the shower is running. My mother hums a haunting melody, one that I think she made up. She used to sing it to us when she was in her half-lucid state. A
wordless tune that is both sad and nostalgic. It may have had words to it at one point because every time I hear it, it evokes a sunset over the ocean, an ancient castle, and a beautiful princess who throws herself off the castle walls into the pounding surf below.
I stand outside the bathroom door, listening to her hum in the shower. I associate this song with her coming back from a particularly crazy phase. Usually, she hummed it to us as she patched up whatever bruises or slashes she had caused during her crazy phase.
She was always gentle and genuinely sorry during these times. I think it might have been an apology of a sort. Never enough, obviously, but it may have been her way of reaching back to the light, of letting us know that she was surfacing out of the darkness and into the gray zone.
She hummed it incessantly after Paige’s “accident.” We never did find out exactly what happened. Only my mother and Paige were in the house at the time, and only they will ever know the real story. My mother cried for months after, blaming herself. I blamed her too. How could I not?
“Mom?” I call out through the closed bathroom door.
“Penryn!” she calls out through the shower splashes.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Are you? Have you seen Paige? I can’t find her anywhere.”
“We’ll find her, okay? How did you find me?”
“Oh, I just did.” My mother doesn’t usually lie, but she did have a habit of being vaguely evasive.
“How did you find me, Mom?”
The shower runs freely for a moment before she answers. “A demon told me.” Her voice is full of reluctance, full of shame. The world being what it is these days, I might even consider believing her, except that no one but her sees or hears her personal demons.
“That was nice of him,” I say. The demons usually took the blame for the crazy, bad things my mother did. They rarely got credit for anything good.
“I had to promise I’d do something for him.” An honest answer. And a warning.
My mother is stronger than she looks, and when given the upper hand of surprise, she can do serious harm. She’s been contemplating defense all her life—how to sneak up on an attacker, how to hide from The Thing That Watches, how to banish the monster back to hell before it steals the souls of her children.
I consider the possibilities as I lean against the bathroom door. Whatever it is she’s promised her demon is guaranteed to be unpleasant. And quite possibly painful. The only question is who the pain will be inflicted upon.
“I’m just going to collect some stuff and hole up in the corner office,” I say. “I might be in there a day or two, but don’t worry, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want you coming into the office. But don’t leave the building okay? There’s water and food in the kitchen.” I think about telling her to be careful, but of course, that’s ridiculous. For decades, she has been careful about people and monsters trying to kill her. Since the attacks, she’s finally found them.
“Penryn?”
“Yeah?”
“Make sure you wear the stars.” She’s referring to the yellow asterisks she’s sewn on our clothes. How I can not wear them is beyond me. It’s on everything we own.
“Okay, Mom.”
Despite her star comment, she sounds lucid. Maybe that’s not the healthiest thing after desecrating a corpse.
~
I’m not as helpless as the average teen.
When Paige was two years old, my father and I came home to find her broken and crippled. My mother stood over her in deep shock. We never did find out exactly what happened or how long she stood frozen over Paige. My mother cried and pulled almost all her hair out without saying a word for weeks.
When she finally came out of it, the first thing she said was that I needed to take self defense lessons. She wanted me to learn to fight. She simply took me to a martial arts studio and prepaid in cash for five years worth of training.
She talked with the sensei and found out that there were different kinds of martial arts – taekwondo for fighting when you have a little distance, jujitsu for up close and personal, and escrima for knife fighting. She drove all over town signing me up for all of them and then some. Shooting lessons, archery lessons, survivalist workshops, Sikh camps, women’s self defense, anything she could think of, everything she could find.
When my father found out about it a few days later, she had already spent thousands of dollars we didn’t have. My dad, already grey with worry about hospital bills for poor Paige, lost all color in his face when he learned what she had done.
After that rush of manic activity, she seemed to forget about ever having signed me up. The only time she asked me about it was a couple of years later when I found her collection of newspaper articles. I’d seen her cut them out of the newspaper now and then but never wondered what they were. She saved them in an old-fashioned photo album, a pink one that said “Baby’s First Album.” One day, it was out on the table, open and inviting me to glance at it.
The bold title of the article carefully pasted on the open page read, “Killer Mom Says the Devil Made Me Do It.”
I flipped to the next page. “Mother Throws Toddlers into Bay and Watches Them Drown.”
Then the next. “Child Skeletons Found in Woman’s Yard.”
In one of the news stories, a six year old kid was found two feet from the front door. His mother had stabbed him over a dozen times before she went upstairs to do the same to his little sister.
The story quoted a relative who said that the mother had tried desperately to drop off the kids at her sister’s place only a few hours before the massacre, but the sister had to go to work and couldn’t take the kids. The relative said it was as though the mother was afraid of what might happen, as if she felt the darkness coming. He described how after the mother snapped out of it and realized what she had done, she nearly tore herself to pieces with her horror and anguish.
All I could think about was what it must have been like for that kid who tried so hard to make it out of the house to get help.
I don’t know how long my mother stood there watching me looking through the articles before asking, “Are you still taking your self defense classes?”
I nodded.
She didn’t say anything. She just walked past with wooden boards and books stacked in her arms.
I found them later on the lid of the toilet seat. For two weeks, she insisted we keep it there to keep the demons from coming up through the pipes. Easier to sleep, she said, when the devil wasn’t whispering to her all night.
I never missed a single training session.
CHAPTER 8
In the office kitchen, I collect instant noodles, energy bars, duct tape, and half the candy bars. I put the bag into the corner office. The noise doesn’t bother the angel who seems to be enjoying the sleep of the dead again.
I run back to the kitchen just as the sound of the shower stops. I run several bottles of water to the office as fast as I can. Despite being relieved that she has found me, I don’t want to see my mother. It’s good enough that she’s safe and in the building. I need to focus on finding Paige. I can’t do that very well if I’m constantly worried about what my mother is up to.
Trying not to look at the corpse in the foyer, I remind myself that Mom can take care of herself. I slip into the corner office, close the door and bolt it with the door lock. Whoever had this office must have enjoyed his privacy. It works for me.
I was confident of my safety when the angel was unconscious, but now that he’s awake, him being wounded and weak is not enough to guarantee my safety. I don’t actually know how strong angels are. Like everyone else, I know close to nothing about them.
I duct tape his wrists and ankles together behind his back so that he’s hogtied in the most uncomfortable-looking position. It’s the best I can do. I consider using twine to reinforce the duct tape, but the tape is strong and I figure if he can get past that, the twine isn’t really goin
g to add much to it. I’m pretty sure he barely has enough energy to lift his head, but you never know. In my nervousness, I use almost the entire roll of tape.
It’s not until I’m done and looking at him that I notice that he is looking back at me. All that hogtying must have woken him up. His eyes are a deep blue, so deep they’re almost black. I take a step back and swallow the absurd guilt that surfaces. I feel like I’ve been caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing. But there’s no question the angels are our enemies. No question that they’re my enemy, so long as they have Paige.
He looks at me with accusation in his eyes. I swallow an apology because I don’t owe him one. While he watches, I unfurl one of his wings. I pick up scissors from the desk drawer and bring it close to the feathers.
“Where did they take my sister?”
The briefest emotion flickers in his eyes, gone so fast that I can’t identify it. “How the hell should I know?”
“Because you’re one of the stinking bastards.”
“Ooh. You cut me to the bone with that one.” He sounds bored, and I’m almost embarrassed by my lack of a stronger insult. “Didn’t you notice I wasn’t exactly chummy with the other fellas?”
“They’re not ‘fellas.’ They’re not anywhere near human. They’re nothing but leaking sacks of mutated maggots, just like you.” Lookswise, he and the other angels I’d seen were closer to living Adonises, complete with god-like faces and presence. But inside, they were maggots for sure.
“Leaking sacks of mutated maggots?” He raises his perfectly arched eyebrow as though I’d just failed my verbal insult exam.
In response, I cut through several feathers of his wing with a cruel snap of my scissors. Snowy down floats gently onto my boots. Instead of satisfaction, I feel a wave of uneasiness at the expression on his face. His fierce expression reminds me that he had been outnumbered five to one by his enemies, and he had nearly won. Even hogtied and wingless, he sure could give an intimidating look.
