by Baen Books
He demonstrated by pointing his camera at her. The bear had given him homework on finding the optimal lines to lead the viewer’s eye to the subject. By shifting to his left, he could use Gin’s long legs as leading lines to her face.
She blew a bubble with her chewing gum while glaring at him. He thought she was trying to decide if he was bullshitting her. “Pecan tassies.”
“What?”
“I want pecan tassies. You make cookies for everyone else. I drive you around.” She stabbed the table with her pencil. “I like pecan tassies but the ones you get at the store are just cheap-ass cardboard tasting things.”
“Oh. Sure. I can make pecan tassies.” He’d been afraid that she would get angry at him if he made her cookies. He couldn’t remember exactly why but it had to do with her yelling at him about something to do with political alienation and gender roles. “I’ll look up a recipe and see what I need to buy.”
There was an angel in the Pocahontas IGA supermarket.
After school, Gin had driven him the twenty winding miles through the wide valleys between the mountains into Marlinton. Both Green Bank and Dunmore had little convenience stores with a pair of gas pumps outside, but they carried only the basics at a steep price. For bulk quantities of inexpensive food and pecans, he needed the bigger, cheaper store.
He hit the sales items of collard greens, dried black eyed beans, and corn meal first. He wanted to stock up. He wished it wasn’t so hard to get to Marlinton; he liked being able to shop without everyone paying attention to everything he did. He could pretend his life was completely normal.
He turned the corner and saw the angel.
She crouched in the center of the aisle, her wings gleaming brighter than the overhead fluorescents. The air was filled with the scent of thunderstorms and spring rain.
Dugan ducked back around the corner. He pretended to look at the shelf in front of him while trying to decide what to do. She'd been kneeling in front of the baking supplies. He didn't know what angels would want with King Arthur flour, but there she was, big as life.
To make tassies for Gin, he needed flour, dark brown sugar, and pecans. Even if he talked Gin into a different type of cookies, he would need flour and white sugar.
"Angels are not real," he whispered.
Neither were talking bears.
One delusion at a time.
He turned the corner, hoping that she might have disappeared.
The angel still crouched in front of the baking goods. She seemed to be picking up bags of flour just to put them down again.
He edged around the wings, trying to keep focused on what he needed. Generally speaking, if he didn't pay attention to his delusions, they didn't pay attention to him. The bags of shelled nuts were right by the corner. The white sugar was on the shelf below the nuts. The brown sugar put him closer to the angel. The scent of thunderstorms grew stronger.
It was never good when he could smell the delusion.
He braced himself against the fear skittering around in him, and shifted closer to grab the nearest bag of flour.
"What?" she growled. Her wings flared wide, like an eagle before its strike.
He squeaked and backpedaled. Not good. Not good.
She wore a black leather jacket, an expensive-looking silk scarf, knee-high combat boots and an open carry handgun. She had gleaming red hair with soft curls gathered with a green velvet scrunchie. She was the most beautiful being that he’d ever seen. Even without the wings, she was too stylishly dressed to be a local.
Maybe she was a tourist. A Hollywood starlet in Marlinton for—for—for some inexplicable reason and he was just imagining the massive wings. It would mean that there was a real woman in his path and he was simply being weird. Again.
He didn't normally notice people's eyes; he wouldn't be able to say what color Gin had. The angel’s eyes were too vivid green to miss. The angel stared at him in surprise and confusion. It was as if she didn’t expect him to actually notice her.
And he was staring back at her. It was clearly pissing her off as surprise gave way to anger.
"I-I-I--" He pointed. “Flour!”
She glared at him.
"Please. Can I just get a bag?" He edged closer to the flour.
She stood up to block him. "I'll get it for you."
It felt like a trap. He didn't want her to pick up the bag. Either she was as real as the bag or the bag was as delusional as her. He didn't want to leave the store just thinking he had flour when he didn't.
She crouched again and her wings brushed over him. They were soft as thistledown and brilliant as halogen lights and tangible as the wind.
Were they even really there? He tried to catch hold of the feathers as they trailed over his fingertips. His fingers closed on warmth, trapping nothing. She didn't seem to notice.
Wings not real. If she handed him flour, chances were that the bag didn't exist either.
"I'll get a bag of flour," he said despite the fact he probably wasn't talking to anyone. He added, "I'm almost out" just in case Gin heard him talking to himself.
"No." The angel picked up a bag and something black darted out into the aisle.
Out of pure instinct, Dugan stomped on it without seeing it clearly. It was the size of a very big cockroach but the shape been wrong.
It squirmed under his foot. It felt pissed.
He whimpered. He just knew if he lifted his foot, it was coming for him. Up his pant leg; all sorts of claws and fangs and possibly scorpionlike tail.
And at the same time—there may be nothing at all under his foot. Probably. It was unlikely anything like that was hiding among the flour.
The angel stared at his foot, still holding the bag of flour that she picked up. "Don't move."
She put down the flour. Reaching into her jacket, she pulled out a huge gleaming knife. It blazed as white as her wings.
Stabbed by angel or bitten by bug from hell?
Dugan jerked backwards. The angel shouted and stabbed. The blade missed the bug by a hair and buried tip first into the floor. The bug darted toward him. He stomped on it again.
"I said don't move." The angel grabbed hold of his wrist with her free hand.
"Don't stab me in the foot!" He stood still only because, without breaking free of the angel, he couldn't flee the bug. She had an iron grip on him.
She tightened her hold as if she knew he would bolt at first opportunity. "I need to be in position. Hold still until I say you can move."
"Don't stab me in the foot."
"I'm not going to!" She jerked free her blade. She shifted closer, knife pointed at his foot. "Move!"
She let loose his wrist. He snatched up a bag of flour and took off running. Something tiny screamed, like a baby rabbit caught by a cat. He glanced back. The black spot of the bug was pinned to the floor by the angel's gleaming dagger. Her wings were spread wide, hooding the angel as she pulled out a second dagger.
The aisles stocked with baking goods created leading lines that pointed directly at the angel. It was a perfect picture. He lifted his camera and took it.
Gin was at the magazine section, leafing through an issue of Field & Stream. “I really don’t understand this glorification of hunting wild animals.”
“It’s free meat,” Dugan said. “It’s like winning the lottery.”
She held up the magazine, showing off the cover picture of a pretty blonde woman holding a massive gun, dressed all in camo. “This is not about food! It’s about sport! The fun of killing!”
“Shh!” Dugan glanced behind for the angel. It didn’t seem as if she’d followed him. “That’s Field & Stream! You should read Garden and Gun.”
“I looked at that. This is West Virginia, not the Deep South.”
“That’s debatable.” Dugan grabbed her hand to drag her toward the checkout counter. “Let’s go. I need to get home.”
“What the hell is your rush?”
He didn’t want to tell Gin about the angel because she
probably didn’t exist. “I shot three squirrels yesterday. I like to cook them slow for about an hour.”
“You’re eating meat again?”
“Yeah. Vegetarian wasn’t working for me.” He decided when he started seeing wolves pretending to be people in Charlottesville, it was time to give up on the weird diets. Seeing talking bears clinched the deal.
“Okay. That lane there.” Gin pointed to nearest line. She slipped the Field & Stream into one of the magazine racks opposite the candy. Below it was The Times West Virginian newspaper whose headline read “Massacre Body Count Rises!” In smaller font it stated “Utica Wolf Hunt Continues.”
See, Dugan thought, that’s what normally happened when people tried to interact with large wild animals. They ended up dead. They weren’t taught photography. Then again, wild animals normally don’t ransack high schools.
“Utica doesn’t have wolves.” Gin pulled the newspaper out to read the top story.
“Did you hear about the bear?” Dugan suddenly wanted validation that his world model on animal behavior was normal. He was right—wasn’t he?
“What bear?” a woman asked.
The angel was standing behind him. Gleaming wings widespread. Fierce eyes fastened on him.
He was sure he was staring back with horror.
“Hm?” Gin didn’t look up from her paper. “What about a bear?”
“What bear?” the angel repeated. “I’ve heard that there’s an unnaturally large bear in the area.”
He glanced at the huge pistol on the angel’s hip. It felt very dangerous to tell one delusion about the other. He needed the bear.
“Someone at school said something about a bear.” Gin flipped the newspaper to read the bottom half of the front page. “Is that why Creepy canceled on you?”
The angel poked him hard in the ribs. “What bear?”
Time to deploy decoys! “Yes. Someone left food out in the school offices. Bacon maple donuts. A black bear got in and made a mess. You know how bears are. They’ll break into a locked car to steal groceries. They’ll come up onto your porch to eat your cat’s food and lick the grease trap of your grill clean.”
“Yet another reason I can’t wait to graduate and go to college some place civilized.” Gin didn’t seem to notice the angel. “This is insane. A dozen people mauled by wolves in Utica. The sole survivor has gone missing. If I had his last name, I’d hide from the media too. I wouldn’t want it smeared all over the media. People are cruel.”
Did anyone notice the angel? Dugan scanned the people around them. No. No one seemed to be looking at the woman with gleaming wings. He made the mistake of meeting her eyes. A weird jolt of knowing that passed between them: he knew that she knew that he knew that she was invisible to everyone else. Her eyes narrowed with the knowledge.
“Dugan, are you ready to check out?” The cashier surprised him by knowing his name.
His heart dropped as he focused on her for the first time. The cashier was Jenny Brice, eyeing him with a wariness that suggested that she never forgot or forgave him for “monster lurking in the cornfield” incident. They hadn’t been in a class together since that night. Her parents first moved her out of his fourth grade room and then held her back a year. Eight years was a long time to hold a grudge. Jenny rubbed her left bicep. Did she have scars? The button-down shirt of her uniform covered the place where the monster’s claws had scratched her.
“Y-y-yes, I’m ready.” Dugan stammered. Oh, God, he was so screwed.
Gin stuffed the newspaper back into its holder. She added a pack of Big Red gum to his purchases. Since she paid for gas, he bought her snacks. It made Jenny’s eyes go wide as she realized that they were together.
He was still trying to ignore the angel. His illusion wasn’t cooperating.
Her wings brushed warm over him as she leaned forward to whisper, “Have you seen a big bear? It probably isn’t black.”
Dugan shook his head. He needed to protect the bear. This was not the time, though, to go full on crazy and talk to someone that wasn’t there. Gin was his only friend. He didn’t want to add fuel to the fire that was Jenny Brice.
“You’re new around here, Virginia.” Jenny didn’t score points by using Gin’s real name. He wasn’t surprised that Jenny knew Gin’s name. Gin stood out at Pocahontas High School. “You don’t know what’s dangerous around here, like poke berries and rattlesnakes and Dugan Harman.”
“Shush you,” Dugan said as calmly as he could. “I said I was sorry for every day we were in fourth grade together.”
“Sorry doesn’t cover having your whole life screwed up. All summer I have nightmares about the wind moving through the leaves in the corn field. I haven’t been in one since that night. And I still have this!”
She lifted her sleeve to show off the five parallel cuts across her bicep.
“Can you just check me out?” Dugan nudged his purchases closer to the scanner.
Jenny passed the flour over the scanner. “Harmans are all shifty people. Black pot moonshiners. Bootleggers. Snake oil salesmen. They get barrel-fever something awful, seeing things that aren’t there.” Jenny thumped the bag down harder than needed. “His father killed three men. The state of Virginia executed him for it. His mom threw herself off of New River Gorge Bridge. His grandmother drowned herself in Shavers Lake.” She picked up the pecans and shook them at Gin. “His family are all nutcases.”
“I like nuts.” Gin caught Jenny’s wrist and forced her to wave the pecans’ bar code past the red eye of the scanner. “They make life tasty. Got anything against dark brown sugar?”
Jenny snatched up the plastic bag of brown sugar and scanned it. “He had me believing that there was something chasing us through that cornfield. I believed I could hear it moving closer and closer.”
“You must be fun on a snipe hunt, then,” Gin said.
“He’s a crazy, mean bastard. He likes to scare people.”
“I haven’t done any of that for years,” Dugan said.
The angel put a Payday candy bar down beside his bag of white sugar. He eyed it. Was it really there? Had he missed Gin putting it there? No, Gin was glaring at Jenny like she was about to start throwing punches.
“I’m just being friendly . . . ” Jenny rang through the sugar, Gin’s gum and the mystery candy bar.
“You’re using a definition of that word I’ve never heard before.” Gin grabbed one of the store’s plastic bags and started to fill it up with Dugan’s purchases. “Save your breath. I’m not listening to you.”
The angel brushed past Dugan to pick up the Payday before Gin could bag it. “I’ll talk to you later, when you’re not in the middle of a cat fight.”
Jenny focused on ringing up the total. Gin frowned at the conveyor belt as if she noticed the candy bar’s absence. Neither girl looked at the angel as she unwrapped the Payday and bit into it. Dugan glanced at the cash register’s screen. Last item was a candy bar.
What the hell? Had he just paid for phantom food? Would he find it in the bag later? Was the angel actually walking away, unnoticed by everyone, eating his candy bar?
“I am so screwed,” he whispered to himself.
The angel drove a big, black Land Rover with Pennsylvania plates. It was parked five slots down from Gin’s ancient Subaru. The angel’s wings had vanished as she strolled across the parking lot to it. Dugan glanced into the SUV as they walked past it. A gun vault for rifles was bolted into the cargo area. Daggers, pistol, and rifles. Why would an angel be so heavily armed? What did she want with his bear? Why Pennsylvania plates? West Virginia was the place that was supposed to be “Almost Heaven.”
Filled with unease, Dugan buckled his seatbelt. If the bear and the angel were both mere delusions, what did it mean that one was hunting the other? Was this his super-ego fighting with his id? Could the bear be “killed” by the angel? What did that mean for him? Maybe if he lived near one of the big cities like Charleston or Huntington, he could hope to get a job earnin
g minimum wage. Marlinton was the nearest “big” town. Despite being the county seat, it only had a population of a thousand. Green Bank had a total of 143 people in it. The handful of jobs weren’t trusted to crazy kids from infamous families. His dad’s family hadn’t been moonshiners by choice; there wasn’t any other way to making a living.
The whole photography thing was a long shot but it seemed like it might work. He was learning a lot from the bear. Was this angel going to mess it all up? Could she kill the bear? Were either one of them even real? Something had trashed Dr. Creagh’s office. Jenny had charged him for a Payday. The candy bar was not in his bag.
He thumbed through his pictures. Had his camera captured what he had seen? Had he even taken a picture? Yes, he had. The screen showed the angel kneeling in the baking aisle, her dagger a blazing whiteness in her hand. Her wings were an odd haze over her, like a fog reflecting a car’s high beams. What had appeared as individual feathers to him was merely brightness without form. The bug didn’t show up, not even as a blur of darkness, despite the fact that her boots were the most in focus objects in the photo. It looked like she was holding a dazzling glow stick over a random point on the floor.
Gin was going through her pre-ignition ritual of picking out a CD for her car’s stereo and muttering darkly about Green Bank’s ban on electronics. Gin glanced at the camera’s screen. “You took a picture of that woman? She was hot.”
“You—you saw her?”
“In the parking lot. She drove the black Land Rover. Yeah, I saw her. She’s not from around here. Not with a Land Rover, Doc Martins and a Hermes scarf.”
“You saw her in the parking lot but not in the store?”
“That’s what I said.” Gin stuck a Band-Maid CD into the stereo’s slot.
“She was behind us in the check-out line,” Dugan said.
“Nah. She couldn’t have been. I would have noticed her.”
