by Scott Speer
Maddy smiled wistfully as she flipped through the pages, wrapped up in wonder at all the things that had seemed so important at the time: what boy Gwen was into at the moment, how embarrassed Maddy had felt when she tripped during an assembly, what they served and where she sat at lunch, whether she’d die before she ever kissed a boy. (Really kissed a boy, not just a peck like she’d done during the spin the bottle game in James Durgan’s basement that one time.)
Looking at her diaries, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—or both. When she’d had enough, she carefully put them back in the old box and slipped it under the bed, then sank down to sit on the floor with her back against the mattress edge.
Maddy started to shiver as she thought of the Darkness growing across the ocean, sprawling in the distance as it grew out of the sinkhole. The demons would cut down Tom and his fellow pilots without blinking. She could almost see the jets dissolving into blazing wreckage as the demons knocked them aside and advanced on humanity.
With a shudder, Maddy chased the bloody images from her mind. She couldn’t think that way. She couldn’t stand even another hour thinking that way, even if it might be true. She needed some kind of hope.
Spurred by this restless energy, Maddy knew she couldn’t just sit in her uncle’s house, waiting. For what, she could not say.
Nonaction is complicity. Maddy forced herself to go outside, to do something. To get out of her own mind and feelings. Anything would be more productive than wallowing. On her way out the door, Kevin insisted on coming with her.
• • •
Aside from the occasional emergency siren, Angel City was eerily silent. Kevin and Maddy decided to check on the neighbors. Some had managed to evacuate via the chaotic freeways before the mandatory curfew was put into place, but others were left with no other choice but to hole up in their houses with as much food and water as possible, and hope for the best. Not everyone believed the demon sinkhole actually posed a threat, and some stubborn folks simply didn’t want to leave their homes behind, but for the most part, and for most people, there was just no way out.
A hush of expectation hung over the city. The atmosphere was strangely calm, almost like a holiday, Maddy thought to herself. Except on a holiday, tactical fighter jets didn’t scream in the sky on their hourly demon patrols.
After talking to some of their remaining neighbors, Maddy and Kevin reached the house at the end of the block, where the old woman they’d known for years still lived. They knocked on the door.
It cracked open and an old lady with a head of white hair peered suspiciously out the small opening. Two small dogs yipped at her feet.
“Mrs. Dawkins?” Maddy said. “It’s Maddy. Maddy Montgomery, from down the street.”
“Who are you?” the woman said. “You’re not going to make me leave my home!”
“I’m not here to take you out of your house, Mrs. Dawkins. I’m Maddy. Remember? I used to help you pull weeds?”
The suspicious lines around the old woman’s face softened. Just a bit.
“They’ll have to pull my cold, dead body out of here before I leave my house and my babies behind!” The two lap dogs yipped even louder at this, as if agreeing with their batty owner. Behind Mrs. Dawkins, coming from the living room, Maddy could hear the TV news loudly blaring updates about the demon attack.
“Well, please, just stay inside. If anything should happen . . .” Kevin said, then stopped himself. “Well, it’s just best to stay inside. I’ll check on you later to make sure you’re okay.”
Mrs. Dawkins opened the door slightly more to look Kevin up and down. “Thank you,” she said, then closed the door. The barking dogs and the loud TV faded as Maddy and Kevin walked down the street.
“Let’s go back to the house,” Maddy said. “I want to see if I can get in touch with the authorities. They’re going to need me, Kevin. I just know it.”
“I had a feeling you’d say something like that. I’m going to be worried about you, kiddo,” Kevin said, squeezing her shoulder. Before they knew it, they were back at the house.
“I have no choice, Kevin,” Maddy said. “I need to do something.”
“I know. I know you do,” he said. “It’s just . . . it’s so hard to watch you go out, to step right into something I can’t even imagine. It’s selfish of me, I know. But I always want to protect you.”
Maddy felt strange as she and Kevin walked into the house. Her mind was racing, and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything all day. This was no good; she needed to stay sharp. She was going to force herself to at least drink some juice.
Each step she took toward the kitchen seemed so real, so clear, yet somehow distant, as if she were floating above, watching someone else do it.
“Kevin, is there any apple juice left?” Maddy asked. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and the voice sounded far off. Her feet felt controlled by a puppeteer as she watched them stepping off the carpet and onto the scuffed linoleum of the old kitchen.
Kevin walked into the kitchen and passed in front of Maddy. Her eyes followed him slowly, and it almost seemed like there were blurry streams of light trailing him as he walked by.
He opened the fridge and looked inside. “We sure do have some apple juice. You want a big or little glass?”
“Little.”
Kevin pulled a cup down from the cupboard and began filling it as Maddy cast her eyes toward the window and looked to the city. She thought of her Protections, almost all of whom had probably been able to leave the city. The most fortunate ones always were able to get out and save themselves first. Either way, she couldn’t feel their frequencies anymore. The Global Angel Commission, the organization in charge of handling “the Angel question,” had banned Angel activities, and with the Angels now nowhere to be found, they knew no one was going to protect them now. Those who had the money to escape were taking no chances, fleeing however they could, whether by private jet, helicopter, or even hired boat. As usual, the people who couldn’t afford those luxuries were left behind to protect themselves against the unknown.
Maddy just stood there as Kevin put the juice away, her hands held tensely against her chest, when suddenly something struck her like a thunderbolt. Nausea spread from her stomach through her limbs. She was definitely not okay.
“Kevin, I don’t feel so good.”
He turned around, and, seeing her ghostly face, he put the glass of juice down on the counter.
“Maddy? Maddy!”
Maddy felt the ground disappear underneath her. She was falling, falling into nothingness. There was no bottom. There would be no end. At once, a maelstrom of fire and smoke exploded before her eyes. And there was blood. She couldn’t see it, but she knew she sensed the smell of blood. Out of the flames emerged two eyes, then almost what looked like limbs as she kept falling, each one on fire and boiling with dark smoke. A Dark One. The thing seemed to grin at her.
Maddy opened her mouth to scream, but as the fire consumed her, no sound escaped.
Suddenly she found herself back in the kitchen, staring at her uncle as he took her by the shoulders.
“Maddy!” Uncle Kevin shouted. “Are you okay?”
She was standing upright, safe there with Kevin. The Dark Angel, the fire, the smoke—all of it was gone. Then she realized what had happened. It had been a premonition. She shook like a leaf in a winter storm.
This had been her strongest premonition since the one of Jackson’s death, right before she saved him.
“Was it . . . did you have one of . . . those things?” Kevin never really knew how to talk about her powers.
Before she could answer, the ground suddenly began to quake violently. China rattled in the cupboards as Kevin steadied himself against the counter. The glass of juice smashed to the floor, shattering. Just as he was standing up straight again, Kevin had to grip the counter tighter to stay steady as an
even larger tremor rolled across the Angel City basin. The quake rumbled louder than thunder.
Suddenly, an air raid siren began howling in the distance, rising above the din of all the car alarms set off by the quakes.
Maddy kept her balance throughout the event, just staring, almost blankly, out the kitchen window in shock. The absolutely terrifying vision she’d had was still frozen in her mind: an almost abstract, grisly scene of destruction.
But what was happening now wasn’t just a vision.
When she finally turned back to her uncle, her brownish-green eyes deepened into a gray sadness as she watched him struggle to keep upright against the force of another tremor shuddering the floor underneath their feet.
“It’s starting.”
CHAPTER SIX
In the ocean below the navy surveillance helicopter, the demon sinkhole spun and boiled. The blue-green whirlpool of the massive, mile-wide sink appeared to extend downward infinitely. Its watery walls were steep, dropping into the darkest of pits, opening up a fissure to a demonic portal.
And no one knew what was waiting at the bottom.
U.S. military helicopters, flying from a nearby aircraft carrier, took shifts monitoring the site, but were staying much higher than their first patrol crafts had. At the very beginning, when they hadn’t understood the danger, at least three helicopters had been drawn into the orbit of the whirlpool and had been lost. They weren’t making that mistake again.
“Hey, Chen. I’m beginning to wonder if these demons are ever going to come,” Private Dee Jacobson said to the guy next to him. “How long have we been up here, anyway?”
“Too long,” Private Chen said, yawning. He checked his watch. “And we got another three hours. And I’m hungry. You got anything to—?” Then his eyes grew large as he looked out the window at the swirling pit underneath the helicopter. “Jacobson, what’s that?”
The crewmen looked out into the dangerous waters. Below, the sinkhole seemed to be shrinking before their very eyes, growing smaller and smaller with every passing moment. They watched with hope as the swirling waters seemed to fold in on themselves.
Jacobson leaned out the window. “Is it going away? Is it?” He laughed in relief. “It’s going away! Chen, you see this?”
An enormous gust of air blew up toward the helicopter from the pit below as the sinkhole kept shrinking inexplicably.
“Hold on!” a shout came from the cockpit. The chopper shuddered and tilted sideways, violently, before the pilot steadied them again.
Jacobson radioed back to their carrier. “Giant Killer, we have action here at the sinkhole site,” the crewman said. “It almost looks like, well, you’re not going to believe this, but it looks like the sinkhole’s disappearing!”
“Go again, Charlie Niner Niner?” the voice from the carrier responded in disbelief. Below, the water had become darker and darker, until almost black.
The crewmen hadn’t noticed the change and were still laughing. But Chen was quiet as he looked once more out the window. “I have a bad feeling about this. . . .”
The others followed his gaze and saw the problem. For several moments, all the crewmen on the helicopter held their breath. The water below became still. Silent. The pool had become smaller than ever. It all looked so harmless, except for the inky black spreading out from its center like an oil spill.
Suddenly the pit began spiraling again. Faster, faster this time. The whirlpool started developing rapidly, expanding and expanding, and growing faster by the second.
“What the hell is that?” Jacobson screamed.
Crimson red tendrils began spiraling up from the bottom of the sinkhole into the churning black waters. More and more red frothed up to the top until the entire roiling waters spiraled into a giant, frothy sinkhole.
Of blood.
One lone demon emerged slowly from the bloody froth. It was enormous. Its black skin, rugged with scales, seemed to actually be on fire, a putrid mass of black flame and smoke roiling off its body. In fact, its skin most certainly was afire, shifting, moving, and searing with dark flames. Enormous spiny protrusions ran along its back, terrible and murderous. Multiple heads gnashing black teeth emerged from its chest, jaws snapping and snarling at the sun itself. The Dark One beat its scaly wings once, then twice, circling the sinkhole in a counterclockwise motion.
Then another demon emerged.
And another.
Soon, dozens rose up, all dripping fire, bloodred and blood-black, from the terrible waters.
“Dear God,” Chen said.
“Get us out of here, now!” Jacobson shouted frantically to the pilot.
The military surveillance copter fought against the storm winds and rose higher and higher, away from the pit.
“Charlie Niner Niner, achieve safe distance!” the voice from back on the carrier yelled over the radio.
Suddenly, an F-18 shot across the sky, deafening as it roared overhead and began to circle back.
“Boys, the cavalry has arrived. Proceed back to bearing zero-niner-twenty-four,” a voice from the fighter jet said over the radio. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Roger that, we are heading back,” Chen said. “Gladly. You watch your six out here, Trav.”
“Roger that. Getting a read on the enemy.”
The helicopter moved toward the relative safety of the carrier and battleships, some miles away.
“Will you get a load of that,” the copilot of the fighter jet said in disbelief and practical wonder as he looked at the sight below.
The demons were flying just above the surface, still in the shelter of the swirling pit, circling in the opposite direction of the roiling black and red froth.
“Looks like they’re not coming out to play,” the pilot said.
Suddenly, one demon rose up and skimmed just meters above the surface, advancing toward the fighter jet, which was trying to get a position on the hole.
“We have a bogey,” the copilot said. He leaned down and took a picture of the demon below with his iPhone as the jet banked hard right.
“I’m not scared or nothin’,” he said over the radio. “But that’s one ugly sucker.”
“Focus, man, focus,” the pilot said.
“Got it,” the copilot said. “Okay, move in tighter. Let’s see how he likes a taste of Uncle Sam’s medicine.”
“Moving in,” the pilot said, speeding up until they were right behind the Dark Angel as it roared across the ocean surface.
Beeeeeeeeeeep. The targeting screen turned red as it locked onto the demon’s heat source.
“Missile lock! Missile lock! Let’s smoke this demon right now!”
“Engaging,” the pilot said, flipping up the trigger guard and pressing the missile button.
The missile fired—and flew right over the demon’s shoulder.
“Damn!”
The Dark Angel spiraled its body around, shooting left. It looked only mildly irritated.
“Giant Killer, we need some backup firepower!” the copilot shouted.
The answering voice came from flight control over the radio: “Roger. Incoming. Course set to niner-eight-four-niner.”
All at once, four surface-to-air missiles launched from a tactical battleship in the strike group with the aircraft carrier, leaving wispy jet trails as they flashed toward their target. At the same time the jet spiraled to follow the demon and launched another missile its way.
The Dark Angel only had a half second to look sideways, its expression almost curious. First the jet’s rocket struck, and then, a split second later, the ship’s missiles seared the sky and collided with the demon as it skimmed along the surface of the ocean. One shot after the other. BOOMBOOMBOOM BOOMBOOM.
The force of the explosions was visible in the orange fire below, which flared back in the tinted glass of the pilots’ helmets
.
“Target hit. Bull’s-eye,” the pilot confirmed.
“Did it work? Did it work?” The copilot’s voice was calling frantically. The F-18 circled around, and from the billowing smoke of the explosion, not a demon was seen. Only a disturbance in the water where the flaming wreckage of the missile lay.
“Roger that,” the pilot said coolly.
“Holy crap, it worked! We got the bastard! Giant Killer, we have downed our first Dark Angel,” the copilot said. “Ha-ha!”
Screaming against the g-forces, the jet banked backward, away from where they had struck at the demon.
The navigator checked his green radar screen. “Giant Killer, looks like we have three bogies on radar. Hell’s bells, this is going to be fun.”
Suddenly, behind the jet, the demon that had been struck by the missiles emerged from the water. And it looked angry.
“Pull up, pull up, pull up!” the copilot screamed. “Bogey is back, bogey is ba—”
In what seemed like a mere blink of an eye, the Dark Angel was on the jet, colliding in a cataclysm of fire and fury against the wing. Jet fuel incinerated as the aircraft crumpled into destruction. The demon continued flying up even as the fiery wreckage of what once was a mighty fighter jet arced toward the ocean at 200 miles per hour. The flaming ball impacted the blue-green surface so immediately that it appeared as if it had hit concrete. It shattered instantly into a million pieces, taking the lives of the pilots along with it.
“Do you read, over? Do you read, over? Dammit, Trav, answer me!” the control tower called from the carrier.
But there was no answer.
From the sinkhole, even more demons began to rise, circling.
They looked to Angel City.
• • •
Maddy’s gaze was focused on a small fly on the inside of the kitchen window. The insect beat itself against the glass as if striving for the sun outside, launching itself again and again, its wings flapping more desperately now. Even though it was a few feet away, this fly seemed to take up every inch of Maddy’s field of vision. Suddenly, the bright sun outside dimmed dramatically until it cast off the glow of a very red sunset. But it was still two in the afternoon, hours from dusk. The fly was now bathed in a bloodred light as it even more frantically tried to escape, too insignificant to realize it was trapped inside the glass. Maddy was transfixed.