The first night we watched a hot teenage girl try on outfits for like an hour, which was all right, then we watched a chubby guy repeatedly and obsessively measure his own dick for twenty minutes—starting from different points, hard, soft, using a ruler, using a measuring tape—and that was less than all right. But mostly we watched people watch TV.
I’d had a few opportunities to slip away from Zang in the past seven days, and I took every single one. But I never made it more than a block or two before he stepped out of some darkened alleyway, or up from between two cars, and just stared at me blankly until I turned around. But to be honest, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to leave anymore.
All that quiet time I’d spent crouched in strangers’ bushes with nothing but an evil mannequin for company, Zang’s words kept echoing around in my head.
You don’t have a life.
You don’t have a purpose.
You’re trash.
He wasn’t wrong. I failed out of high school. The closest thing to a job I’d ever had was busking on the subway, and I was god damn terrible at it. Any friends I once had, I’d insulted, turned away, or gotten killed. What was I going to do with my miserable excuse for a life, go back to college and fix air conditioners?
The only remotely useful thing I could do was fight these psychopaths and their faceless pet dickheads. Maybe cost them an angel or two in the process. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was all I really, truly wanted. The drinking wasn’t “to have a good time” these days; it was so I could sleep without hating myself so actively it kept me awake at night. The punk shows, what few I still bothered with, were just a distraction—me going through the old motions, trying and failing to recapture the feelings they used to bring about. The cigarettes were only killing time, and myself. Why was I holding out on Zang?
We weren’t any different. Something took away his humanity. I pissed mine down the gutter. Might as well do something useful with the pitiful shells we had left.
“I won’t take off again,” I said to Zang one night, squatting on the roof of a low parking garage across from a Section 8 apartment complex.
We were watching a Mexican girl with a vivid red dye-job dance with herself, all alone in her shitty studio off Wilshire. Zang was squatting at the very edge of the roof like a punk rock gargoyle.
“Cool, man,” he said, without so much as glancing away from the girl’s windows.
Here’s a fun fact I’d learned: Zang only blinked to pass as human. On these long stakeouts, he didn’t bother. Yes, that’s exactly as fucking unsettling as it sounds.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and you’re right. The only worthwhile thing I can do is fight these things with you, and it’s not like anybody gives a shit if I live or die. Why am I holding back? I won’t take off again, at least not without returning. So you can quit watching me like a hawk and popping up outta Dumpsters and shit every time I go for a walk.”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll probably just keep doing that for a while.”
“No, really,” I said, standing to stretch my cramped legs. “I’m in. I’m with you. But I have some conditions.”
“Such as?” he asked.
“No more murdering people,” I said.
“That’s a deal breaker,” he said, and laughed.
But I knew he was serious.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, no more murdering people unless we talk about it first.”
He was silent for so long I thought he was ignoring me. When he finally spoke, it startled me so badly I damn near jumped out of my skin.
“All right, then,” he said. “Then I get counter-conditions. One for one.”
“Okay,” I said, already mentally flipping through the various atrocities he’d probably ask me to commit.
“You can’t leave for good without talking to me first,” he said.
Shit, and here I thought he was going to demand virgin’s bloody hand delivered nightly. Can’t pass up a deal like that.
“Done,” I said. “Second condition: No more keeping me in the dark about the Empty Ones and what we’re doing. I ask a question, I get a straight answer.”
“Fine,” he said, immediately.
Wow. I really expected pushback on that one.
“But you have to practice conversing with me for one hour every night,” he added. “And you gotta be honest about whether or not I’m passing for human.”
I laughed, but he didn’t so much as smile.
“Yeah, sure, man,” I said. “Last condition: You gotta allow me time to do human shit. I need to piss and crap; I need to eat; I need to sit down for a while sometimes; I need to grind for beer money; I need to masturbate in relative privacy. I need me time.”
“That’s cool,” he said, still staring, unblinking, at the girl, now hand drying an infinity of plates. “My last condition: If we see an opportunity to harm or destroy Jie, we take it, without argument.”
Theeeere it is. That’s the one that’s going to get me killed.
Ah well, has to happen sooner or later. I basically made peace with my own impending doom the second I opened my mouth to tell this monster I’d be his new partner.
“Deal,” I said.
We lapsed into uneasy silence for a moment. Well, uneasy for me—I don’t think there was such a thing for Zang.
“I’m glad we made this system,” he finally said. “It was just in time.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “We need to talk about murdering this girl now.”
SIXTEEN
}}}Jackie. 2013. Los Angeles, California. Brentwood.}}}}}}}}}
Normal!
Damn, I don’t even remember what that is. It makes me think of white people in khakis and button-downs, laughing on a picnic bench somewhere. And you know what? That’s not too far off from life at my parents’ house. My mom likes long skirts, and my dad’s worn jeans every day since he became his own boss, but otherwise they fit the picture to a T. And they did have a picnic table in the backyard.…
It was weird, being back at their place. I can’t call it “home,” because I had never lived here. My parents moved out to L.A. to be closer to me, which was so codependent it was creepy, but whatever. It meant I got to skip out of my sad bachelorette’s apartment once in a while and eat artisanal cheeses up in Brentwood. The only price I had to pay was the regular lecture about how I could stay at their place permanently if I wanted—I could even take the guest quarters out back if I needed my privacy.
Yeah: me all sneaking boys past my parents at age twenty-five. I don’t need help feeling pathetic, thanks. I can manage that one just fine on my own.
Now, I’m not gonna front here: I wasn’t out to prove I could get by without Daddy’s money. I love me some money, Daddy’s or otherwise. I wasn’t slumming in L.A. for the fun of it.
Hey, don’t scoff—that happens! I know some rich white girls that live as close as they dare to Compton just for the thrill of it. (Spoiler alert: It’s not very close.)
My parents would buy me whatever stupid frivolity I needed. They’d buy purses and fund vacations without a second thought. But they’d never help me pay my bills. I think their longterm plan was to live close enough so that I could get a taste of the good life whenever I wanted it, but never pay my rent or anything, so that I didn’t get too comfortable to move back in with them. Seriously. That’s how devious they are.
They’re pretty awesome.
But as brilliant as the plan was, it wasn’t working. They mistakenly thought I was more spoiled than I actually turned out to be. I know! I was surprised to learn that, too.
It turns out that as long as I could afford food and the occasional night out binge drinking, I could live with the occasional fridge-roach. Mommy and Daddy’s little slice of temptation was just a nice vacation spot for me. I wouldn’t let it become the real world.
But damn, could I ever use the vacation right about now. I had beco
me so accustomed to life on the road that I’d forgotten just how shitty, well, everything was: shitty beds impressed with the sad, chaotic grooves of thousands of strangers. Shitty coffee left too long on the burner. Shitty hotel chairs that were never broken in because they got shoved away into the corners while the bed pointed toward the TV. Shitty drive-thru food eaten joylessly in parking lots—hastily hiding your shame every time some passerby looked in the car just as you took a huge bite of fried mystery meat. Shitty showers with shitty water pressure and shitty towels that felt like somebody had masturbated into burlap. And then …
My parents’ house.
Even as a kid, I never felt fully at ease in my mom and dad’s home. They weren’t monsters; they never yelled at me for touching anything. But it still felt like I’d been accidentally locked inside a museum after hours. Their belongings were always put together just so, arranged by some abstract sense of appropriateness rather than by purpose. If you used a blanket and left it crumpled up in a pile, you’d come back to find it neatly folded up and draped over the chair at a jaunty angle. The exact same jaunty angle it had before you so ostentatiously disturbed it, in fact. The entire house was guest soap. Technically functional, but frowned upon to use.
But if you put that unease in the back of your mind, and let yourself just run rampant over their distinguished collection—socked feet up on the flawless varnished redwood coffee table; slumped deep into the enormous couch so white and flat it looked like a salt plain, no hairs marring the surface, no unsightly balls of lint clinging to the throw pillows, no butt grooves on the cushion—it was a damn sight more comfortable than life on the road.
I was nestled deep in an angora blanket, doubtlessly hand woven by an indigenous artisan whose story my mother would know by heart, and crumpled into the alabaster couch, eating chocolate ice cream straight out of the container like some sort of maniac. The gargantuan flat-screen TV blared the whiny protestations of an obnoxious, overly hip MTV reality show. I had lost track which one. This teenager could be pregnant, or she could be headed to rehab. Maybe she needed scaring straight. Whatever, her point was that her parents didn’t understand her. That’s every teenager’s point.
I was acutely aware that I was cancer to this house: an ugly, low-rent tumor squatting in the den, not even having the decency to realize that one does not use the den—it is there as more of a conversation piece; an idea to entertain, distantly, before opting to retire to the study instead. And I was the happiest malignant lump you’d ever see.
Mom and Dad had been weirdly accommodating since I showed up, unannounced, at the front door. They loved seeing me, of course. I was their one and only baby girl. But they had some unspoken rule-set for visits that I never fully grasped. I guess I was supposed to call first, even though, at the end of every visit, they were firmly adamant that I could stop by anytime. One time I specifically remember my dad shouting “no need to call first!” as we waved good-bye. And yet every time I took them up on that offer, their faces told a different story. Their expressions were invariably both amused and disdainful, like a maître d’ at a fancy restaurant forced to address a rapper by their hip-hop name.
Monsieur 2 Chainz, the wine list, if you please, their arched eyebrows and puzzled smiles seemed to say.
But that wasn’t how it went down this time. I showed up at the door after an extended and unexplained absence, and they threw their arms around me like I was a soldier returning from war. When I crashed out on the couch and immediately flipped on the television, they didn’t politely invite me to sit with them in the garden instead—they just stood in the kitchen and smiled at me.
When the weird Asian girl showed up, I was six deep into a binge-watch of Catfish. This fat kid in an anime hoodie was fucking irate that the girl he fell in love with online was also fat, because she’d used an outdated profile picture from when she was skinny. His own avatar was a hunky male character from a CW show about demons and stuff, but he didn’t seem to appreciate the irony.
The Asian girl didn’t say anything to announce her presence. She just stood there, silently watching me watch offended internet trolls for God knows how long.
“Jesus!” I said, when I finally noticed her.
I jumped, and melted drops of chocolate ice cream danced precariously across the bottom of my spoon, both eager and afraid to ruin something as valuable as the angora throw.
“Not quite,” she said, and smiled.
“That’s uh … a pretty creepy thing to say. Who are you? Are you supposed to be here?”
This chick looked like she was nineteen, tops. She had platinum silver hair cut into a jaggy punk bob, and black lipstick. She was wearing red short-shorts over torn fishnets, and a skin-tight Descendents T-shirt. She didn’t exactly fall into my parents’ usual “elderly rich white person who looks like they stepped out of a commercial for insurance” social circle. She could have been somebody’s rebellious daughter, I guess, but seeing her standing there with those flat eyes and that uneasy grin, it seemed more likely she’d broken in to vandalize the place.
“Oh, honey,” my dad said, stepping out from the kitchen like he’d been waiting for his cue. “This is a friend of ours, uh … Jie. Jie, this is our daughter, Jackie.”
The uncomfortable way my dad said “Jie” told me he barely knew her name. His clumsy Anglo tongue hadn’t had time to get used to the exotic syllable yet.
Like hell this was a family friend.
Alarms went off inside my head. My stomach seized up like a menstrual cramp. I started salivating excessively …
That’s a weird fear response; good to know, body.
“Mom, Dad,” I said as calmly as I could. “Can I please talk to you in the other room?”
Jie’s smile collapsed. She looked through me with her blank eyes, the same expression a shark has, just before those white eyelids roll up.
“You’re a quick one,” she said, her voice now absent of all its former tone and melody. “Restrain her.”
My parents looked at each other askance.
“What are you, mental?” I laughed.
It was forced, obviously—putting on a brave front I absolutely did not feel. In fact, at the time, I was genuinely wondering whether I was peeing myself, or if I could just add “legs get oddly warm” along with “extra spit” to the big list of Things Jackie’s Stupid Body Does When She’s Fucking Terrified.
“Who’s going to restrain me?” I said. “You’re the only one here.”
Jie swiveled her head around like an owl to stare at my mother.
“Sorry, sweetie,” my mom said, and took a step toward me.
“What? What the hell are you…” I backed away from her, but I knew there was nowhere to go. The only exit from the den was through the kitchen, which would leave me trying to fight my way past Jie and now, I guess, my own dad?
“Why, Mom? Did they … get to you? Did they turn you?”
I squinted at her face, trying to see if it had gone strangely indistinct like those of the Unnoticeables. But no, it was still my mom. With her crow’s feet and worry lines and matronly braid.
“No, honey,” she said. She was advancing on me slow, with her hands out, like I was a strange dog she didn’t want to spook. “But they promised they wouldn’t hurt you. They don’t want you, they just want your friends.”
“My friends? You mean K? Mom, please—” My butt bumped against the low bookshelf marking the end of the room. “You can’t. You’ve known Kaitlyn like, all of her life. You can’t just…”
“We don’t have a choice,” my dad chimed in, with his sitcom-father-wrapping-up-today’s-moral voice. The disingenuous tone he used when he thought I was being unreasonable. “These things, they aren’t human. This one put your mother’s garden shears through her own eye just to prove a point. Last week I snuck away when they weren’t watching and called the police. They showed up within minutes … to hand me back over to her. There are dozens of them all around us, right now. They’re i
n the garage and the guest rooms. In the neighbors’ houses. Just watching. They don’t sleep. Sweetie, some of them don’t even blink.”
“No, Dad.” I was watching him while he spoke, and my mom took the opportunity to inch closer to me. Almost within arm’s reach now. “K, she knows all about them. She’s got these powers now, she can fight them!”
“What’s the point in fighting them?” my mother said. She had tears in her eyes. “You heard what your father said. We’ve seen it. They don’t die.”
She reached out, hands shaking, to grab my wrists.
What am I gonna do, punch my mother?
I let her guide me toward the couch, and sit me back down. My dad came over with a roll of duct tape and bound my hands and feet together. They were both crying now.
“This will all be over soon, darling,” he said.
My mother kissed me on the forehead, and then drew the angora throw back up over my shoulders, tucking me in.
SEVENTEEN
}}}Kaitlyn. 2013. Los Angeles, California. Brentwood.}}}}}}}}}
My first instinct was stupid, because it wasn’t to run, like Carey was screaming at me to do.
My first instinct was to tell him to calm down, explain what he meant, work this thing out. By the time I realized how irrational that was, the Chinese girl was already moving. She wasn’t quite as fast as Marco had been, with his short bursts and spastic gestures, like a spider lunging at prey. You could see Jie moving, fluid, like mercury on glass. By the time your brain had fired its feeble instructions to your clumsy limbs, begging them to react, she was already somewhere else. She didn’t even look hurried as she darted across the room, like she knew my limitations; knew my useless body could never respond in time, so she only put forth the barest effort to come out ahead. She loped across the kitchen in a few quick bounds and raised her hand. I tried to put up my own to block my face, but I was already staring at the ceiling, flat on my back, the pain of the blow still dancing up my nervous system.
Kill All Angels Page 12