To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1)

by Sean M O'Connell

  The pressure her small hands generated on his windpipe was not enough to make him even flinch. With savage grace, he wheeled mid-air and flung her into the side of a van parked in a neighboring driveway. Stars swam in a blurry darkness and she tasted copper with the impact. The percussion created by her impact blew out the glass of the van and set an alarm to wailing.

  No!

  The siren would draw people from their houses, paranoid and curious, directly into harm’s way.

  More tinkling bits rained down onto the pavement and Serena rolled away, stunned. Brown was there immediately, yanking her up bodily by her hair and pistoning her face into the side view mirror until it broke off and fell.

  Hot blood poured. She fought back, flailing her elbows and lashing out with her heels. She was rewarded only with dull thuds and an increasing need for oxygen. Brown seemed unfazed. For some reason, her blood-soaked vision focused on the little diamonds of broken auto glass now littering the road. They refracted the last bits of day into tangerine and lava-colored bits of firefly light. Something about their unorthodox beauty kept her from succumbing to the tempting surrender of unconsciousness. She writhed harder, twisting around underneath the Brazilian and kicking hard. Her heel caught a kneecap, and the bodyguard swore.

  “Bitch!”

  He finally released the death-grip on her hair and reared back to punch her. The gnarled fist came down with a sickening crunch, but he was off target. Instead of Serena’s nose, his knuckles met the gritty blacktop.

  The unforgiving surface shattered bone.

  Again, an almost animal bellow pierced the evening.

  Serena rolled away and got to her feet. Two short steps and a jump and she was rising over the rooftops of her childhood neighbors. Pearly plumage glowed pink in the sunset, and she stole a quick glance back. He was there, right behind her, a dark figure in the darkening sky. She beat harder, straining to move faster through this new dimension. The smell of her own blood saturated the air as it ran freely from her face and down the front of her.

  Sensing her attacker’s proximity, Serena changed course and dove back toward the house, where her parents lay in final repose. She wanted to go to them, to wake her grumpy old father and dote on her mother for once. But she couldn’t.

  They were gone.

  Brown was shouting at her, something about returning home being a bad idea.

  She silently agreed. Even the thought of those cooling bodies broke her concentration.

  The Brazilian was too strong for her, too experienced.

  He was not a stranger to violence like she was. He relished it. The stinking, lusty sweat on his skin and deranged wetness in his eyes told her as much.

  She wouldn’t face him and fight like she had the Bruja this morning.

  She was fast, so she would flee, and hope that he followed. If nothing else, she would lead him away from the house, the neighbors -and most of all- her own parents.

  They were dead and gone, lost to the tragedy at hand.

  Despite her inability to protect them, she couldn’t bear the thought of this devilish man touching them again. She would not allow it. Gritting her teeth, and tasting more blood, Serena swung away and into the dark.

  The Brazilian followed, hot on her tail and furiously efforting to catch up.

  Serena strained for more speed, flexing new muscle for altitude. Straw-colored hair whipped wildly in the wind. Already the temperature had dropped significantly with the setting sun, and as she moved through the air, gooseflesh rose.

  She heard Brown cursing behind her. Then farther behind. She was stretching the distance between them. His frustrated cries followed her up toward the purple clouds. Serena looked back, and smiled with a bloody face at the grim set of Brown’s mouth. Taunted, he kept coming, just like she hoped.

  She headed west, toward the darkest part of the city grid, guessing that the power outages would have driven people to other areas.

  Fewer people to get hurt.

  Far below her, the screaming alarm of the ruined van drew the neighbors from their houses. Small figures scrambled about the emerald lawns and scratched their heads at the phantom car accident. They would trace the carnage to her folks’ house, and see to it that the deceased were cared for.

  Serena whispered a prayer for them.

  More blood trickled into her eyes and she wiped it away. Already the flow was slowing as her body repaired itself with miraculous speed.

  The notion gave her confidence. She might not be able to defeat the hardened Brazilian one on one, but it would be difficult for him to kill her. For whatever reason, that was his apparent goal. Now, she wanted to kill him too.

  Eventually, her parents would need to be avenged. Even as she winged off into the new night, Serena Dayne pondered at whether revenge was allowed her, in light of her blessings.

  She doubted it.

  West Valley City, Utah

  “They hide here, in groups of four or five most of the time.” Scott Fitzpatrick explained. “I think they appreciate the strength in numbers, but only a few of them can get along at a time. In large groups they start fighting one another. That’s how we find them sometimes, the racket they make.”

  Aaron Dayne listened intently. Returning to soldiering mode, his mind sponged up the details of Scott’s debriefing. The larger man had been fighting this fight since that day at the hospital, meaning he was as much of a veteran of this battle as anybody could be.

  Still, there was something fundamentally different about the way that Scott made war than Aaron had ever seen. Much different than what he himself had experienced in the Carneguerra.

  Each night, when they would return home to where little Danny and Collie and the others waited with a hot meal, Scott’s grim-set mouth would soften and he would smile a genuine smile for the boy or the dogs. He would laugh with them only briefly before his rest, but the moments of fun were real.

  Aaron envied him this ability.

  He himself would smile along with the family, but his mind was elsewhere. Not even the loyal dogs could free him of his dark mood. He tried, especially for Danny, to be himself. But the act wasn’t quite up to par…

  In the moment, Aaron had other things to worry about. There were four of them now, walking slowly along a darkened stretch of Redwood Road, just west of the city proper.

  If Salt Lake City had a ghetto, this was it. A good portion of the storefronts had been boarded up long before the troubles had started. The rest closed over immediately following.

  They walked through suspended clouds of burnt plastic and death. Hasty graves of garbage cairns and dumpster coffins took the place of proper burials for those unable to escape the accidents or the roving opportunists.

  Off to his right, Aaron noted the gaping hole of what used to be a pawn shop doorway. It appeared as though someone had rammed a car through the iron and glass doors, no doubt looking for valuable electronics, and even more valuable guns.

  He was thankful for the high-powered MP-6 submachine gun he’d been issued. “If the natives are restless,‘ a former commanding officer had once told him, ‘you had better have superior firepower.’

  Aaron wore black. Like all of his new comrades.

  According to Bishop, a total of thirteen men had been considered for ‘emergency enlistment’. Four of them had been offered the chance to join the ‘Sleepless Knights’. Three had agreed. Aaron, a SWAT cop named Travis Marx who doubled as a combat instructor for the Army, and a lean black man named Shawn Harper. Aaron didn’t know Harper’s credentials, but he had been assigned to drive an armored personnel carrier that looked like a UPS truck from hell. Harper had been sent off as part of another group.

  Scott wore black tactical pants, boots, and a gray tank top, despite the relative chill. His pale muscles bulged thickly under the cotton.

  Somehow, he loomed even larger than usual against the burned out buildings and blowing trash.

  Marx, the SWAT officer, walked on the other side of him la
den with tactical equipment and double ammunition belts.

  Beyond him was one of the KC regulars. A funeral-looking blonde with a nametag that said Monk, like Aaron’s own.

  This man apparently possessed no desire to speak. He was on the tall side, and well-muscled. A swimmer’s build.

  Still Scott dwarfed him, dwarfed them all. He spoke, and the rest of them listened.

  “They are mean, and fast.”

  His words interrupted the rhythmic crunching of their four pairs of boots on the street debris. Glass and ash and garbage.

  “But they don’t seem to be any stronger than a regular person. A really pissed-off regular person. And they hate me. Everyone like me.”

  “The Angels.” Marx clarified.

  “No.” Scott didn’t like the title.

  What else should we call you?

  “We aren’t angels, we’re just people who’ve been given a.. a gift.” From the sound of his friend’s voice, Aaron could tell even he didn’t believe it.

  “Angels are like unicorns. They only exist in stories.”

  Marx argued with him.

  “C’mon man. You aren’t just gifted. Pro-athletes are gifted. Artists are gifted. Sammy Hagar, he was gifted. You.. you can fly. I saw video of you throwing a car at a burning building to make an exit for the people trapped inside! And from what I hear you can’t be killed either.”

  Scott stopped then, and fixed a hard glare on the wiry cop. When he spoke, his voice had an edge that was unfamiliar even to Aaron, who’d known him since grade school.

  “Just because I heal quickly doesn’t mean I can’t be killed. I saw one of us, a guy who’d been changed like me, he died. And we all knew it was coming too. Even him.”

  Aaron’s eyes scanned the corners and the rooftops around them as he listened.

  “We were trying to find this little Mexican girl. Her parents told us she’d been carried away by demons. Diablos.” Aaron did his best not to picture an innocent young girl being carried off by people like they’d fought in the hospital.

  “It was too late when we got to her. He and I fought them for almost an hour. There were just way too many. Odds must have been fifty to one. We had to cut our losses and bail. But he wasn’t willing to leave the body of this little girl behind. So he turned back. The halo appeared, everything.. I followed him, but he just sailed right on into the biggest shit storm I’ve ever seen. They tore him apart, literally. Like sharks or crocodiles or something.” The big man’s pale eyes clouded deeply. “His body couldn’t heal him through that.”

  Scott reached into his own back pocket and pulled out what looked like a battered seagull feather. It was long and grayish white. He handed it to Marx, who turned it over gingerly in his small hands.

  “That’s about all that’s left of him. So don’t get it twisted. I can die just like any of you.” Now he turned his hard stare on Aaron.

  “We can all die. And a lot of us are probably going to before this is over.”

  It was a warning that he wanted to drive home to the lesser men. He snatched the feather back and tucked it away.

  Scott wasn’t happy with Aaron’s decision to join the fight so actively.

  He thought his friend should take more time to mourn and to be with his son. Still, he didn’t argue with Aaron Dayne. They’d been friends far too long for him to think that it would do any good.

  Scott continued.

  “Anyway, like I was saying.. These people can’t stand me. They are drawn to us. I think they can smell better too, like I can. It’s almost as if they pick up the scent and then they appear. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they will stop. They will try to kill us. Me especially. ”

  He started walking again, and the others fell into step with him. Crunch crunching down the dark, abandoned street.

  “They are not just bloodthirsty zombies, either. They might appear that way, but it’s just the rage in them. They’re cunning. I’ve seen them fake death or injury, so make sure…”

  Scott paused again for a small moment, tilting his head as if listening. Aaron figured he was hearing something with this heightened senses that the rest of them could not.

  He guessed correctly.

  “It’s about to get ugly boys. Something’s stirring up about two blocks down. They don’t know we’re here yet, but they will soon.” Scott’s began flexing his hands in anticipation and mumbling to himself. Almost as an afterthought, he addressed the SK soldier.

  “I guess this is where you come in?”

  Blank-face nodded a somber nod and spoke for the first time, gesturing as he did so with the butt of his rifle.

  “We’ll set up there, just short of the intersection. No billboards on the roof, so if they come in hot, those of us that are earth-bound will have a clearer line of fire.” He sounded almost bored.

  “Delta pattern. With the flyer in the middle.”

  ‘Delta pattern’ was the fancy SK term for a triangle formation. They would set up a rough triangle. Two at the high corners, one on the rear point, and the “flyer” which in this case could only be Scott, would be in the middle. In effect it allowed the three men, with their guns and night-vision goggles and flak jackets, to take up cover positions and left Scott exposed in the middle of the street. Of course he had the advantage of some sort of mutant healing factor if things did go bad, but it seemed more of a risk than necessary.

  “Let’s get to it then” Scott said.

  The other three listened. He was the only one of them without tactical training, the only one unaccustomed to a chain of command, and yet he outranked them all by default.

  The little quartet fanned out, their pace shifting from a march into a stalk.

  Marx darted, low and fast, to the cover of a storefront awning that had fallen onto the street. Once there, the compact man unclipped an ammunition belt and laid it carefully next to him. He lined up flash grenades carefully, like a child with his toys. Aaron took up the other high corner of their triangle. Two cars were still parked along the side of the road, windows broken out and interiors looted, yet they sat one behind the other in neat accordance with the laws that had actually meant something not so long ago. He hunkered down between them, resting his back against a bumper and swiveling his head and gun muzzle in all directions to make sure that he had proper lines of sight on each point of the compass.

  Behind them, the lazy SK regular tipped over a taco cart and set his Barrett 101 sniper rifle on its bipod. He lay down on his stomach behind and nestled one cheek almost tenderly against the stock, heedless of the debris that no-doubt dug into his knees and stomach and elbows.

  However lethargic this man appeared on the outside, Aaron had no doubt he would be anything but come show time. After all, he was the only one of them who was actually selected and trained by this strange troop they all found themselves a part of.

  Far off down the road, Aaron could see a little convoy of headlights heading toward them. Traffic was thin in town these days. The majority of the citizenry had either bunkered up somewhere they thought was safe or had fled to who-knew-where. It was mostly National Guard vehicles and patrol cars that rolled the littered streets now, especially at night. Dayne wondered who was in the vehicles and where they were going. He wouldn’t find out tonight though. More important tasks at hand.

  “Here they come boys.” Scott warned. “They’ve picked up on me, so they are going to be pissed off.”

  He pointed to the building at the southwest corner of the nearest intersection, less than a hundred yards away.

  “Right behind there, I can hear them.”

  Aaron flicked the safety off and the firing selector to three shot burst on his MP-6. He sighted to the corner of the building. Muzzle trained to the exact spot where he expected to see the first enemy appear, just about neck height. That familiar tingle crept its way up the back of his neck and into his fingertips.

  “How many Scott?” He didn’t need to shout it, despite the distance between them a
nd the light breeze stirring up background noise. Scott’s advanced hearing would probably pick up even a whisper from only this far.

  “At least six.” His friend shouted back. “Two of them women.”

  Women.

  Damn.

  No matter how much he had always tried to remind himself that a woman could be just a deadly as a man -probably even more so given the current situation- Aaron still couldn’t completely shake his old chauvinistic ‘never hit a girl’ attitude. He would do what was necessary, but the trigger pull was never quite as smooth with a female in the crosshairs.

  He had no more time to contemplate the morals of their calling.

  The enemy had arrived, and just as Scott had predicted, they were in a frenzy.

  Two of them came winging around the side of the building at breakneck speed. Aaron had foolishly prepared himself to aim at ground level, forgetting that this fight was almost four dimensional. Traditional urban-warfare training would have to be tweaked to accommodate enemies that could fly. The enemy moved fast, again, just like Scott had warned them they would. One of them carried an axe.

  Marx was the first to fire, unloading almost straight up into the air as the first attacker glided over his position. The rounds missed their mark, and drew unwanted attention to his makeshift gunnery nest. The flimsy cover of the collapsed awning wasn’t enough, and the man with the axe barreled into the former police officer at frightening velocity. Marx was lifted bodily, separated from his little lineup of ammunition and heavier ordinance.

  Aaron aimed after the tangle of their limbs, but thought better than to risk hitting a comrade. He tried drawing a bead on the other of the pair. Too slow. Scott had already taken issue with this one.

  Aaron felt a sort of detachment in his own mind. Years ago, and a whole continent away, he had made war on streetcorners like this, and in the alleyways tucked between buildings. There, his enemy was completely foreign to him. They spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes. They were alien. Here and now, he was about to open fire on neighbors. On people that could have been his friends.