Kill All Angels

by Robert Brockway

  “It is not for dramatic effect,” Zang said. “The place is abandoned. The ritual draws much attention. There is often screaming. Bloodshed. Then the angel comes…”

  “Lights up the joint like a million-watt spotlight,” Carey finished.

  Every hour is rush hour for about an hour in every direction of Los Angeles. That sucks at the best of times, but try sitting in a stolen SUV with an old, smelly, homeless punk, a girl who blames you for the death of her parents, and a psychotic immortal who’s mostly preoccupied with driving and growing back his face. The silence was beyond awkward.

  Carey spun the radio dial back and forth, scoffing and swearing at every single radio station before settling on NPR. They had some old punk guy from back in the day talking about how he’s doing this spoken word stuff now. Carey kept making wanking hand gestures and giving the radio the bird, but he didn’t change the station. In the pauses between segments, I could hear the soft squick of Zang’s flesh melding back together. It was a relief when he finally jerked the truck to a stop in an empty, cracked, and weed-strewn cul-de-sac overlooking the sea. Jackie yelled at him for the teeth-rattling stop, but he started droning on about “ceasing momentum in the most efficient way,” so she just stepped out of the car and slammed the door. I followed.

  The sky and the ocean were the same color, separated by a thin shimmering band where the ghost of the sun still lingered. I could hear waves far below, their echoes confused by the furrowed stone of the cliffs. There was a hidden architecture down there somewhere—half-glimpsed hard angles, flashes of white tile—but I couldn’t make out details. The sun had barely set, but it was midnight in the cove below. It must be shadows from the cliffs, I told myself.

  I wasn’t terribly convincing.

  Carey and Zang took turns spitting off the cliff, then argued about who managed the greater distance. I stood upwind of them, for obvious reasons. Jackie was alone, huddled on the farthest outcrop she could find. She hugged her bare shoulders and shivered, her short brown hair whipping in the wind.

  You should go talk to her.

  She’s gotta calm down eventually. You’ll both put this behind you, and it’ll all be like it was.

  You just have to take the first step.

  Be the bigger person.

  Say something.

  “We should go,” I said. “If we’re going.”

  I turned away from Jackie and started picking my way down the path. That was a generous description: It was a slippery, sandy animal trail, tracing the line of least resistance across unstable boulders and shimmying along crumbling cliffsides without much consideration to such paltry human concerns as “safety” and “terror.”

  “Stop,” Zang said.

  He grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me straight off my feet. I flew backward and landed on my tailbone in the dirt.

  “What the hell?” I yelped.

  “My bad,” he said, and gave me a goofy teenage smirk. Then it dropped away, and he continued tonelessly. “Working these bodies is difficult. I meant you no harm. I should go first on the path. I can see better at night, and sudden falls will not harm me. You are valuable tonight. You cannot be risked.”

  He turned and started off without another word. Carey shrugged at me before disappearing over the precipice himself. Jackie went next. I got up and brushed the dust from my butt. Picked a few pieces of gravel from my elbows. Then I followed them down. I tried not to dwell on the implications of that word: “tonight.”

  The trail started out dangerous and then graduated into a slow-motion suicide attempt. You could actually see where each type of hiker realized this was an idiotic venture, and turned back: The path was most worn right up to the edge of the cliff, where everybody with a functioning brain took one look at the crumbling goat trail and its several-hundred-foot drop onto jagged rocks and crashing waves, and decided that the mall sounded like a better weekend outing, after all. The more confident hikers ventured over the lip and onto the thin, deceptively slippery sand before turning back. The daredevils made it all the way down to the first switchback, where they likely took a few danger selfies so they’d have something to post on Facebook besides their lunch orders and cute pets. The tracks all but faded after the turn, dissipating into a scant few dares from drunken teenagers and a handful of reconsidered suicides.

  We had past that point an hour ago.

  But we weren’t even afforded the weak comfort of isolation. After a particularly difficult section—Zang had to straddle a gap where the trail either crumbled away, or else never existed in the first place, and then serve as a kind of human bridge for us—I fell to my knees and gripped the reedy, windswept grass like safety handles built into the earth. Beneath my clenched fists full of straw, I saw fresh footprints. Not enough to trample us a clear and usable path. Just enough to remind us that we weren’t fording this ridiculously dangerous trail to reach some untouched nature reserve, where we would take dumpy vacation photos and then laugh about our near-death experiences with the other insufferable expats back at the hostel; we were descending into a den full of monsters. Falling to our deaths on the way there would be our best-case scenario.

  I couldn’t see the sunken city from the path. I could barely see the ground beneath my feet, during those few times I could pull my fear-paralyzed eyes away from them. The city was somewhere below or behind us, looming in my mind like a haunted house in a horror flick. I envisioned us rounding the cliff side into a dramatic fog break, the mist parting to unfold an ornate tapestry of broken towers and mossy brick.

  In actuality, we hopped down a series of descending boulders, placed just too far apart to take them like stairs, and when I looked up, we were there. Standing in a sandy inlet tucked behind an outcropping of rock. The waves broke against the far side, leaving us with a small, but relatively peaceful little beach. A trail of gravel chased the cliff-base back into the darkened bay. The waves boomed back there, too, echoing across the rocks like terrestrial thunder. Zang allowed us a paltry few minutes to catch our breath, but you could tell he wasn’t happy about it.

  Carey leaned upright against the rocks, trying to play off his exhaustion with an apathetic James Dean slouch, but his legs were shaking and his face was drenched in sour sweat. Jackie sat cross-legged at the edge of the shore, slumped, shivering, and silent. I was mentally exhausted—my adrenal glands having been burnt out hours ago by the rapid-fire near-death experiences—but I looked for tiredness in my muscles and found none. I flexed my fingers. They didn’t ache, like they should. They weren’t scraped and bleeding, barely able to close into a fist. They felt strong. Even my extra pinky, which up until recently I hadn’t been able to move much at all, now clenched and unclenched easily.

  I’m no stranger to physicality. I made a living pretending to be action heroines. And I’ve even done some climbing—nothing serious, just for fun—so it makes sense that, after that trek, I would be in better shape than an elderly hobo who drinks Pabst for dinner, and a girl who thinks eating ice counts as exercise because it takes more calories to chew than it’s got. But I shouldn’t be this well off. I shouldn’t be at the top of my game. I shouldn’t be spoiling for a fight.

  But Christ, I am.

  “Do you need rest?” Zang asked, his voice flat. He stared into the dark.

  I made a noncommittal noise.

  “You should be tired,” he said. “They are tired.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I said you should be tired.”

  I squinted at him in the half-light. He gazed unblinking at the black curtain that hung across the bay like smog. Like there was some poisonous factory in there churning out shadow as pollutant.

  “How many have you taken?” he asked, still not sparing me a glance.

  “How many what?” I started, by reflex, but I thought better of it. I knew what he meant.

  Why play coy with the monster? The monster knows its own.

  “Two,” I said. “I’ve k
illed two angels. This will be the third.”

  “Good,” he said. “That means you’ll be strong and slow to injure, but will not yet turn on us.”

  “Turn on you?”

  Zang blinked and slowly adopted his human mask. It looked painful, watching that smile carve itself into his flesh.

  “I’m just fuckin’ with you!” he finally said, and laughed. He nodded to Carey. “You guys ready to roll?”

  “As I’m going to be,” Carey said.

  He seemed to have trouble pushing himself upright. His knees crackled when they took his weight. Jackie said nothing. She just stood and faced us, quietly awaiting the next order.

  “Follow behind me closely,” Zang said. “When I pause it means the footing has become dangerous. Grab my hand and I will guide you. Make little noise. They are not vigilant, but they are not entirely oblivious.”

  “They?” I said.

  “The Unnoticeables that live here,” he said.

  “How many?” Jackie said. Her voice was like steel.

  “Only ten that I can see,” Zang said. “But they are not the ones to worry about. Jie takes too much from her followers. She does not leave them enough to function like normal humans, and we should be able to avoid their attention.”

  “So what should we worry about?” I said.

  “The tar men,” Zang said. “I cannot see any now, but even my vision is not keen enough to pick them out in the dark. They will be here. And they will be quiet. And they will be nearly invisible until they are upon us.”

  “What do we do then?” Jackie asked.

  “You will probably die,” Zang answered. “That is why you should make very little noise. Let’s go.”

  He took a step and disappeared into the dark. We followed.

  TWENTY

  }}}Carey. 1982. Los Angeles, California. Westlake.}}}}}}}}}

  “But I don’t want to murder the girl,” I said for the third time. Slowly now, like I was talking to a little kid or a moron.

  “But it is necessary,” Zang said, with the exact same inflection I used on him.

  Is he fucking mocking me? Or is he just parroting back what I say to—how did he put it—practice at humanity?

  “She hasn’t done anything,” I said. I gestured up at her window. A bright square of yellow cut out of the blue denim night.

  I wasn’t kidding. Zang and I had been squatting on the roof of a garage just below her apartment building for a few hours, and all we’d seen her do so far was a little dancing, a lot of dishes, and iron half a shirt. I’ve never seen somebody do so much nothing, and I’ve been unemployed for … ever, I guess.

  “This is not about what she has done,” Zang answered. He alternated between patronizing, frustrated, and totally empty—varying tactics to see which was the magic button that would make me understand.

  “We don’t even know if she’s going to do anything,” I said.

  “This isn’t about what she’s going to do.”

  “Then what the hell is this about?” I snapped.

  “This is about what she could do, if we do nothing.”

  Butting up against the far side of the little parking garage was a run-down three-story adobe building. One window opened right out onto the upper level of the complex, which must’ve really killed the ambience when people lived there—throw open the shades and take in all that lovely fresh exhaust, why don’t you? The building was empty now, but somebody had obviously been ducking out that window to use the roof of the garage as their smoke spot. Not too long ago: It hadn’t even rained since they vacated, leaving their old butts nice and dry. None of that precious nicotine leaching out through the paper, staining it the color of tea. Plus whoever lived there must have been a millionaire; they left a half inch of untouched cigarette on nearly every butt. I gathered up a handful of them, twisted the stems between my fingers to loosen the tobacco, poured it all together, and rolled it back up in one of my own papers.

  What? Oh, this is what you’re gonna judge me for? Not for running away and letting my friends die, or the rampant alcoholism, or being a general no-good parasitic drain on society—secondhand smokes is where you draw the line. Fuck you. Nicotine doesn’t care if it gets in your system via used butts or blown gently up your ass by a Swedish supermodel. Drugs are drugs.

  I took a drag.

  Come, partake of our beautiful Lucky Strike garage tobacco, aged on the ground, next to a broken bottle and an old burrito wrapper, gently toasted over a period of weeks by the warm California sun.…

  I blew smoke in Zang’s general direction. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink.

  “Blink,” I told him.

  He did.

  “You have to remember to blink if you’re gonna pass as human.”

  He started blinking mechanically, once every five seconds.

  “Okay.” I laughed. “Stop, that’s way worse.”

  He stared at me blankly, awaiting further input.

  “You want to kill the girl,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “It’s like the fat kid in the park all over again,” I sighed.

  “Yes,” Zang answered, with something like relief. “She is a candidate. If we don’t kill her now, the angels could use her to procreate. The angel she would birth could kill others, and it, in turn, could use another like her to procreate again. That angel could kill more people, spawn more angels, and so on down the line. To not murder that girl now may be like murdering thousands in the future.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “I knew you guys were messed up in the head, but to hear you actually walk through your fucked-up thought process—I don’t even know where to start with what’s wrong with everything you just said. You’re acting like all of this has already happened, just because it could happen.”

  “Yes,” Zang answered.

  “That’s … that’s dumb, man,” I said.

  “That is how the angels think,” he said.

  “The angels are dipshits, then.”

  He considered this. You could actually see him mull the statement over like it might contain valuable information.

  I used the quiet moment to stare up at the girl. She was cute, in that “I’m so hard up, I’d screw a hole in the ground” kind of way. Which is the only way I know, to be honest. Shoulder-length bright red hair brushed flat, not all teased up into a fire hazard like the chicks go for these days. Wide eyes, big lips, not exactly skinny—at least by L.A. standards—but I liked that. These L.A. girls, they look normal on TV, but once you actually get here and see them in person, there’s something off about them. Those little stick bodies make their heads look bigger than they should be. Like walking caricatures drawn by hacks busking on the promenade. At least this redhead looked like she wouldn’t break in half if you—

  “I don’t think the angels are dipshits,” Zang finally replied.

  It snapped me out of what was obviously turning into a jerk-off fantasy. Probably for the best, considering that I was staring up at some strange chick’s window in the middle of the night, perched atop an empty garage with a soulless psychopath. Any way you cut it, those are suspect conditions for a hard-on.

  “Look,” I said, gesturing at the girl with my garbage cigarette. “You’re never going to beat them by thinking like them. You’re just going to make the same moves they’d make. That makes you easy to predict. That’s why I’m still alive: They can’t predict my moves, because even I don’t know what they are.”

  “That does not sound like good strategy,” Zang said.

  “Well, it works. If you wanna beat these bastards, you gotta think like a human. What is the humane thing to do here?”

  Zang considered this for a minute.

  “Wait until she falls asleep before breaking her neck?” he ventured. “That way she suffers no fear or pain.”

  “You’re making progress, I guess. But no: A human would go up there and talk to her. Tell her what’s coming, and give her a chance to run
or something.”

  “Again, that does not seem like a sound strategy.”

  The redhead heaved a sigh so exaggerated I could practically hear it across the street. She held up the shirt she’d been ironing: a white blouse with a triangular black mark the exact size and shape of an iron.

  I laughed.

  Then I saw it.

  “You’re right,” I said. “She’s not going to run.”

  “What is she going to do?” Zang asked.

  “She’s going to fight,” I answered.

  The girl spun and flung her ruined shirt away. She ran her hands through her hair and pulled at it in frustration. She stomped and paced, jumped and swore, finally returning to the window just to flip the bird to her iron. It was a weird-looking gesture, being performed with six fingers and all.

  * * *

  “Hey,” I said, when the redhead opened the door. She wasn’t stupid: She left the chain on and had one hand tucked awkwardly behind her, probably holding a weapon. “My name is Carey and I promise I’m not a rapist.”

  Not your best opener.

  “O … kay,” she said, slowly closing the door.

  “No, wait! I just need to talk to you about—”

  “Sorry!” she said, in that chipper tone you only use when you’re trying to defuse dangerous psychopaths. “I gotta go. My boyfriend needs something. More steroids, probably.”

  She shut the door carefully, like any sudden motion would set me off. Then a series of solid and final thunks as she clicked every lock she had into place.

  I knocked again. She didn’t answer. Probably already dialing the cops.

  “Can I come out?” Zang asked.

  I told him to hide in the bushes while I knocked.

  You know you’re in trouble when I’m the most presentable face of your organization.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I screwed up the nice approach.”

  Zang stepped out from his hiding spot inside a pair of brittle acacia. An errant thorn dragged across his cheek while he moved. It drew blood. He didn’t notice.

  “There is no time for courtesy,” Zang said. “We are not the only ones watching.”