by J Bennett
His voice is too loud, even though he’s whispering. Strange smells cloud the room, and something is buzzing loud as a swarm of bees. I look over to the table and realize it’s just the hum of a laptop.
I try to rub my eyes and instead send flares of pain through my wrists as I tug against the cuffs. Gabe pulls the blanket off of my shoulders and helps me stand up, one hand under my elbow, the other against my back.
“How you feeling?”
I think about the question, and then I stop thinking. “I need the bathroom.”
“Ha,” he replies, “not going to be easy with those handcuffs.”
“Then take them off.”
Tarren is not in the room. The hunger is. I am aware of Gabe’s fingers on my bare skin; the pulse of his energy in the space between us.
Gabe hesitates. He looks tired and too young for the things in his eyes. I search for a resemblance, something in his face that might be mine as well. Not that I believe him.
Gabe is a head taller than me and thin as a coat rack. His long limbs are trapped in a baggy t-shirt and worn jeans. His hair, the same golden-brown color of his eyes, is still managed by the backwards hat and spills out thick and wavy to his ears.
We stare at each other. He smiles like he can’t help it.
“What?” I ask.
“I don’t know, it’s just…it’s you.” Gabe laughs and shakes his head. “It’s you,” he repeats as if this will clear things right up. His laugh is warm and inviting, somehow untouched by the sheer catastrophe of the situation at hand.
We most definitely do not look alike at all except for a similar point to our chins. Lots of people have pointy chins.
“I really need to go to the bathroom,” I say. “I won’t hurt you. I just have to pee, and I’d like to take a shower.” This may be a lie. I’m not sure yet.
Gabe considers this. Shades of lavender blush within the cloud of color around his body. He says, “I know what Tarren thinks, but he’s wrong. I hated to see you in these things.” He pulls out a pocket knife and cuts through the cuffs. All the nerves in my arms are numb and then, suddenly, spiky and electric. I tuck my hands protectively into my body.
“Don’t take too long, or we’ll miss it. Oh!” The smile jumps right back onto Gabe’s face as if it was only taking a breather in the wings. “I have something for you.”
Gabe reaches for a bag on the floor. “There was a comic book shop next to the pet store. Should’ve seen the poor excuse for a lock they had on the door. Anyway, I, uh, I got you a shirt. Tarren is picking up some other things for you, but this’ll do for now. What do you think of Battlestar Galactica?” He pulls a gray t-shirt from the bag with the words “Frak You” imprinted on the front.
Ryan sometimes talked about the show with his nerdy friends. I cry in the shower. Deep, rib-bruising cries. I can’t stand up, so I sit on my knees while the water soaks my fevered skin. My body is sore all the way into my bones and joints, and I worry that my skin might split open at the slightest pressure. My wrists are torn up, but I don’t know how bad. I can’t look at my hands right now. I just can’t.
My blood and dried vomit pigment the water then wash down the drain.
And then there’s my mother, Karen. What if she doesn’t have her inhaler when she gets the news that I’m missing? What if she mixes up her anti-anxiety pills with her sleeping pills again? What if the stress gives her another ulcer? I threw away the medical encyclopedia, but she’s found out about WebMD, so now there’s no stopping her. Henry, my father, isn’t strong enough to keep Karen under control. He’ll just work more. There’s a good chance he won’t even care that much.
And even though I don’t want to do it, I lift my hands up from the tub and trace the new seams Xing across my palms. They’re almost invisible, except I know they’re there. The skin kisses together like colorless lips, and I push my finger through the slit, wondrous at the heat and pain and wetness inside. And yes, I am freaking out, but I can hardly manage more than a low moan and a couple of sparse tears.
Non sum quails eram. I am something different now. Something inhuman, and I can’t explain what it feels like to not be the thing you always were. To hear hunger as a song no one else can hear; a song that racks your body and entices you to kill. I am half convinced this is all a dream, except the hunger is too loud for sleep.
After the shower, I stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror exploring my pale body for any telltale spikes or horns or other indications of what I am. I see a thin girl with honey colored hair turned dark with water. Flat stomach, patchy legs, foolish purple bangs. A new musculature hints beneath my skin. The eyes are different too. Ryan always accused me of being overdramatic—of seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe, but I look into my own eyes and I see ruin.
The shirt is too large. It swallows my body, and the sleeves settle into the crooks of my elbows.
“Come on,” Gabe says as soon as I open the door. He hands me a bottle of water, and I didn’t know I was thirsty, but I am. Incredibly so. I guzzle the water as we exit the room.
* * *
We sit on the roof of the motel swinging our legs over the side. I look past the parking lot, the blinking traffic lights and the McDonalds across the street, trying to find something worth noticing in the gray dawn. The air is chilled but warming, and the birds are waking up. I can see so much farther then I’m supposed to; can read the license plate of the battered truck puttering into the McDonald’s drive thru.
I realize I don’t know where we are. Still in Connecticut? I sniff the air and receive a heavy bouquet of scents I cannot place. The noises—traffic, birds beating their wings overhead, the McDonald’s drive thru speaker crackling—all blur and blend and beat at me like a thousand fists knocking upon a door out of unison.
“Wait for it,” Gabe says. He is leaning back on his elbows. I try to push away the discordant stimuli, but this only increases my awareness of Gabe’s energy next to me. I could reach over, snatch away that vibrant blue. Instead, I study his hat. The thing might have been white some decades ago. The rim is frayed. The symbol on the crest is worn away, almost unintelligible. It looks like a salmon-colored S with a green triangle over it.
“The boy I was with last night,” I say and can’t finish.
Gabe looks up at me. “It’s a lot to take in. We don’t have to talk about it now.”
“What am I? What did that man do to me? I killed a puppy yesterday. A puppy!”
“Yeah.” Gabe sits up and scratches his cap. “The kid you were with. Boyfriend?”
I nod.
Gabe looks away into the distance. “He’s dead. I checked for a pulse. The angel was trying to take you. Your boyfriend got in the way.”
“Oh.” I wait a while for this to set in. Ryan is gone. Avalon is gone. Happiness is gone. But I am here. Not me, monster me is here. Curved-horns-puppy-devouring me is sitting on this roof thinking about jumping off because I’m too scared and too tired to come up with an option better than concrete blood art.
“Why…” I take a breath. My voice is coming back. “Why did you call him an angel?”
Gabe looks at me then away quickly. His hands fiddle with nothing. “That’s what they call themselves. Big egos. Way big.” He licks his chapped lips. “You see, angels aren’t exactly the Precious Moments figurines society likes to think. In the Bible, angels are God’s warriors. They smite his enemies. Lots of times they disguise themselves as humans, but they’re something else. Terrible and strong. Super humans. That’s what these angels are too, but they’re not working for any God.”
“Where did they come from? Outer space?” I’m not sure if this is a joke until Gabe laughs.
“Nah, it’s all science. Evil genius, Frankenstein science, and…” He stops and looks at me. “You know, it’s kind of our policy to never talk about this.”
“Tell me.”
“It’ll sound crazy.”
I am pushing my palms flat against the concrete roof. Hard.
Keeping them there, because what I really want to do is latch onto Gabe’s energy field or aura or whatever it is and drain him.
“I’ll keep an open mind,” would have been a clever thing to say. What I manage is, “just tell me.”
Gabe keeps staring at me. I can’t imagine what I must look like right now, but evidently it evokes enough pity that he says, “Gary Cook. He created the angels. He was a scientist.”
“What, like a mad scientist?”
“No, not at all. The opposite, actually.” His eyes come up to meet mine, and there is no humor in them.
“You know how they say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions?” he says softly. “Gary Cook was the poster child for good intentions gone bad. Thing is, he looked at this world and saw all the heaps of suffering everyone was going through. The hunger, the sickness, the petty violence, and he decided to do something about it.”
“By mixing up monsters in his lab?”
“He came up with this idea. Pretty damned brazen actually.” Gabe takes in a swill of breath and lets it out long and slow like he needs some time to figure his next words. “Dr. Cook decided to make angels.”
He can’t actually be serious…except that he is.
“That’s where he got his inspiration. He wanted to turn men into angels.”
I stare. Gabe just shrugs. “Dude was a little whacked in the head, but he believed it was possible to…” Gabe searches for the word, “reengineer the human body. He theorized that humans could be made stronger and faster with keener senses—that anything was possible. Maybe even human flight.”
“Oh,” I say. “The man. Last night. We flew.”
Gabe turns his head to look at me. “You’re taking this a little too well.”
“No, I’m not. You just don’t know me.” I’ve begun to barricade my emotions behind a mental door with ruthless efficiency. I am still considering letting myself slip off the roof, but first I want to know what happened to me. I need to understand what I am and how I might go about killing the man who did this to me. I’m sorry Ryan. Revenge would surely be beneath you, but not me. Revenge is the weak soul’s justice, and I am beginning to learn just how weak I can be.
“Cook’s theory revolved around energy transference,” Gabe continues. “He believed that the human body contained a vast untapped potential for strength, intelligence and power.”
I tuck my hands into my body and pick at the torn skin around my wrists. I thrill at the sparks of pain when my nails press into the gashes. Little bits of dried blood fall into the apron of my shirt.
“Tarren understands the science of it a lot better than me, but the thing is, humans can’t get energy directly. Think of the way plants can just suck it up right from the sun. We get our energy by eating the plants or the animals that eat the plants. It’s really inefficient. Each link is farther away from the direct energy source, which means there’s a huge loss of energy. Cook was after a way to cut out all the middle steps so that humans could absorb energy directly from the sun. He thought that such pure energy would allow humans to reach their full physical potential. It’d be like steroids times a hundred, except not only for muscles. For your senses. For your memory. For your mind.”
“But…why?” My voice cracks.
“To save us from ourselves,” Gabe shrugs. “Cook envisioned a world where everyone fed directly off the energy of the sun. Think about it—no more hunger. No more fighting over resources. The superhuman part, I guess I can see it. If everyone was strong and smart and there wasn’t disease and stuff, maybe we could fix our other problems.” A lonely little smile plays across his lips. “Maybe Dr. Cook believed he could fix human nature by making us all something better than humans.”
“No one can actually be that naïve.”
“I don’t know,” Gabe sits up and braces his hands behind him. “Haven’t you ever wanted to create a better world?”
I have absolutely no idea how to respond to this. I mean I do, but I don’t think suddenly imploding into manic, tortured laughter would be very pleasant for either of us.
Luckily, I get distracted by my body going crazy.
Chapter 10
“Gabe,” I say to get his attention. Some additional weirdness is definitely happening to me. My skin tingles, and my hands peel back and grow hot. I turn them over and watch the veiny pink orbs lift to the surface of my palms. Out in the distance, the sun has just cleared the horizon. Sunlight crawls up my knees and flows across my hands.
“What’s happening?” I ask. The song quiets, and I feel the deep fog of exhaustion begin to lift from my mind. My senses sharpen. I gaze through the tinted windows of a squat building three streets down. A woman runs a vacuum roughly over the carpet, and I can make out gaudy rings on her fingers and large silver hoop earrings swaying from each earlobe.
I can hear an old man’s wavering voice order an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s drive thru. The song has grown softer, and when I turn to Gabe and see again the glow of energy about him, I feel more confident that I will not give in and snatch away his life.
“You’re taking energy from the sun, just like Cook theorized. It’s feeding you,” Gabe says. He holds his hand out into the light.
“But I’m still…I mean, it’s still inside me.”
“The hunger?” Gabe drops his hand. “Yeah, I know. Cook got close, but not close enough. Guy was a distinguished university professor. He got his own lab and did a lot of legit stuff that the university knew about. Published papers, gave lectures, that sort of thing, but his true obsession was creating angels. For decades he worked on his project in secret. Eventually, he got funding from a very powerful man named Robert Thane.”
“Thane? That sounds familiar.”
“He owned casinos in Vegas a couple of decades ago,” Gabe replies. “He was a very wealthy and very brutal man. One bad hombre.”
“Oh yeah.” I say. “He was assassinated. His flat was torn up. They still don’t know who did it. It’s, like, a huge unsolved mystery.”
A bright streak of orange flowers and dies in Gabe’s aura. The quick change in color rivets my eyes, sets little shivers vibrating down my spine.
Gabe isn’t looking at me. He pulls at a thread on his shirtsleeve. “Yeah,” he says finally. “Thane didn’t fund Dr. Cook alone. He gathered together a group of high rollers, business magnates, politicians, mob bosses and the like. These were powerful men and women who thrived on success and competition. They wanted to rule the world.”
“Okay, stop.” I lean back on my hands, because those bulbs just need to go away for a while. “You’re talking secret society with cowls and skull goblets and stuff?” I feel my chest tightening up, and I push back, hard. No more tears. No more anything until I figure something out. This whole thing is already beginning to feel somehow unwinnable.
“You don’t have to believe me Maya. I shouldn’t even be telling you all this. I think you should just relax today and…”
“No. Keep going.”
Gabe sighs and squints into the sun. Below, the smell of coffee curdles my stomach. I usually drink it every morning.
“Okay, so we’ve got the super evil club,” Gabe continues. “Not exactly everyone sitting around a table petting fat white cats and planning dastardly deeds, but close enough. These guys were basically arrogant pricks. Rich as hell and bored of buying all the crap they could ever want. They decided to search for a way to become even more powerful. What they found was Dr. Cook. He was the key.”
“How did you even learn all of this?” I break in. “What exactly is it that you and your brother do?”
“Hold on, I’ll get there,” Gabe grins at me.
I hear a door opening and closing below us, feel a familiar energy.
“What is it?” Gabe notices my frown.
“Tarren is coming,” I say. I can feel his energy rushing up the stairs. My muscles clench. “He’s angry.”
“He’s always angry,” Gabe sighs. He squares his shoulders
as the door to the roof bursts open.
Chapter 11
Tarren has his gun drawn, and the breath tears in and out of his body. I am fascinated by the energy — sky blue, almost white — leaping off his body like flames devouring dust dry kindling.
“Get away from him,” Tarren growls. My body responds to the bright, dancing light, and I am drawn toward him even as I fight against the instinct.
“I said move!”
His words finally penetrate, and I quickly scoot away from Gabe.
“More,” Tarren orders, “out of arm’s reach.”
“Come on,” Gabe says.
“Shut up.” Tarren lowers his gun. His heart is jumping so quick, I can see the veins pulsing at his temples. I have to turn away and wrap my arms around my waist.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Tarren starts. “The room was empty. The cuffs were on the floor. I thought…”
“I wanted to take her out into the sun.” Gabe stands up and thrusts back his shoulders. “Everything is fine. I can take care of myself. Honest. Even changed my own diaper this morning.”
“She’s infected Gabe. You’re too blind to recognize what she is. Dear little sis could have latched onto you and killed you. She’s in the cuffs until we figure this thing out.”
“Her wrists are all torn up. She was in pain.”
“I don’t give a damn about her wrists.”
“I didn’t hurt him,” I say.
Tarren looks at me. His eyes have turned gunmetal gray just like mine do when I’m furious.
“Not yet,” he says quietly, “but you can’t help what you are.”
Gabe’s aura rears up. “For fuck’s sake!” he yells. “In case you’ve been too busy worrying about every known thing in the universe, the girl’s just had her entire life destroyed. How about we stop waving guns in her face and treating her like…well, she’s not an angel. She’s not!”
The hunger is flooding my mind, and I strain to hold onto my senses. Hot hands. I keep the skin down over my palms, but I can feel those bulbs pushing against the seams. My nails dig into my wrists, and the pain keeps me anchored. Blood drips between my fingers.