Waltzing into Damnation

by Rita Stradling

  “Where are you going?” Nicholas asks again through measured breaths as he jogs up beside us. “You need to come with us, get out of the open. This is now unconsecrated ground.”

  Linnie and I don’t run; the soldiers can run faster. We ignore Nicholas’ presence and keep an even pace as we make our way through the tarp-and-stick shanties, taking special care to step over the legs that stick out of them.

  “Look,” Nicholas says in a harsh demand.

  I follow Nicholas’ pointing finger to where in the distance thousands of black birds take to the sky, a scattered cloud billowing up like dust under thundering hooves. I turn to Nicholas, meeting slate-blue eyes. “Looks like you guys should be getting under cover,” I say before I clamber over a fallen grocery cart.

  “And you should, too.” Nicholas points before following me. “You need to get under cover, Raven. That’s probably just the honor guard for the demons.”

  I spin on him and say with finality, “We’re not going with you.”

  “I know what happened in there was bad. It shouldn’t have happened. But you need to be safe.” Sweat drips down his angelic face as his gaze stares intently into mine.

  “You don’t get it. You guys aren’t our safety; you’re one of our biggest dangers.”

  “You have no idea the danger you’re in. Also, you are a terrible shot, and you don’t even know how to use that rifle.” He nods to the blue-and-white monstrosity growing heavy under my arm.

  The idea that I’m unaware of the danger I’m in is so demeaning and ridiculous, it takes me a second to respond. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Raven…” Linnie says as the color drains from her face.

  Behind her, the cloud of birds grows, swallowing up houses and shanties at the end of our street. As it consumes another homeless camp, screams erupt into the air.

  People are dying again, dying because I’m here, dying for Albert’s stubborn stupidity. There’s nothing I could do about it.

  Actually, there is something I can do for them: I can leave town and never return.

  Nicholas grabs my wrist, and with a quick twist, the gun pressed to my temple clatters to the ground.

  “We want to help you!” he shouts, yanking me toward the side of the road.

  “Let me go—”

  “Let go of her!” Linnie screams as she scrabbles up my dropped gun and points it around wildly in shaking hands.

  The soldiers close in, circling us, climbing over the trash and debris.

  “Raven, you and Linnie have to come with us! If we stay out in the open, we’ll be infected.” Nicholas’ hand tightens on my wrist as he yanks me toward the soldiers.

  I look around at them. A cold, dark realization brushes through my mind. I don’t need to fight them. I don’t need to escape. All I need to do is keep them here long enough for the birds to come. As we planned in the million times we mapped out our escape, I’ll shield Linnie with my body from the infected birds.

  I’m almost positive the birds won’t attack me. They surrounded me before and just watched me. They’d even followed my orders once.

  The thought of leading the soldiers here to die terrifies me, and it’s not because of the horrible image that flashes through my mind at the idea of the birds attacking the men. The thought terrifies me because I am considering it.

  We’re not going back to that house.

  We’re not going to be their prisoners, even if it is to save all of their lives.

  After a second more of hesitation, I yell, “Linnie and I stay. They’re not going to attack us, but they will attack you!”

  The birds funnel around a house only a block up, surrounding it and its neighbors, weaving through the gaps, moving in fast.

  “Let me help you!” Nicholas yells back, his words contradicting the hand clamped around my wrist. And the soldiers form an unbroken circle around us. They’re a blond-haired, blue-eyed fence, their gleaming guns held down.

  A bout of screams and gunshots titters out from somewhere to our left.

  “Nicholas, bring her in!” Albert shouts from where he was obviously sneaking up on us from behind. I can’t help noticing Thor the thunder jerk said “bring her in,” not “bring them in.”

  I fight against Nicholas’ hold, appealing to them one more time. “Let go! Get under cover! You’re all going to die for nothing!”

  The birds swallow up yet another house, only two houses down.

  “Run!”

  They don’t.

  Shots ring out in all directions as the birds descend.

  “Linnie, come on!” I shout, but she’s already plowing into me. I pull her into a tight hug, trying to wrap around her as much as possible.

  “Shit, shit, shit…” she says as she tucks her head down. “This is way freakier than…” But her voice is suddenly too hard to hear.

  I duck my head as the air fills with an artificial wind. A fury of thousands of black wings zooms by in all directions. All else is drowned out by an overwhelming whizzing sound and the shifting darkness.

  “Don’t attack anyone!” I scream the words at them, knowing it’s idiotic, feeling like a person standing on the tracks, yelling at a train not to hit them.

  Nicholas’ hand drops away. When I grab for him, I hit shifting feathers. Oh, dear God.

  The small feathered bodies streaming between us almost completely obscure him. There’s a sudden smooth movement, a break in the stream of birds, and then the giant lioness crouches over Nicholas’ fallen form. She lets out a low rumble. Tawny short hair gleams in the flashes between the bird bodies that separate us.

  Nicholas cries out but doesn’t fight the lioness.

  “What is that?” Linnie shouts, head ducked, hands over her head.

  The lioness growls again, then she and Nicholas shuffle away, their movements slow, his body mostly under hers as she drags him.

  “It’s Cassidy! She has Nicholas! We have to follow them.”

  It’s extremely difficult to move through the constantly shifting cloud of ravens. We shuffle together, me trying to block Linnie as much as possible, Linnie covering her head.

  Like Cassidy told me before, because of her demon infection, the birds seem to avoid the lioness, veering away from her pelt and clearing a small space around her.

  Teeth gripping his collar, she drags Nicholas over the curb and up the front steps of a house before dropping him.

  Wings slap me as Linnie and I push our way up the steps and past the lioness. Cassidy glares at us, crouched low over Nicholas.

  Forcing my way through, I push at the broken door, but even though there’s only a hole where a knob should be, it doesn’t open.

  I lean down. “Hello?”

  A gleam of white fills the hole. It’s too dark to see any details inside, but I’m pretty sure it’s an eye.

  I move closer, really hoping it’s not a gun or knife. “Please let us in, we won’t hurt you!”

  “Are any of you infected?” a gruff voice calls through the opening.

  “No,” I say, though that’s not entirely true. Cassidy is definitely infected, but they don’t need to know that.

  Something clinks and clanks, and then the door opens a crack.

  I shove Linnie through before it’s all the way open. Then I push the door further, waiting for Cassidy to drag Nicholas in before I follow.

  The moment we step inside, a noxious burnt plastic odor fills my nose and mouth, making me cough. The air feels jagged on its way down, like inhaling thorny stalks.

  A middle-aged man slams the door behind me, throwing the deadbolt. I can barely see him in this light, just a faint outline from the rays of early morning escaping through the curtains.

  Gasps and whimpers echo around the space as an indiscernible crowd of crouched, dirty, bedraggled faces peek over at us.

  “Is that a dog?” whispers the man, as if he doesn’t believe his own question. He can’t have seen much of the lion, but even in this light, she doesn’t look at all c
anine.

  “She won’t attack . . . none of us will unless you attack us, I promise,” I whisper.

  A few stares linger, illuminated in the faint spears of light that slash through the room. Most of the faces duck away as the crowd huddles together.

  I attempt to wet my lips as I look back to my own bedraggled group.

  “Linnie, Nicholas…are you okay?” I lean down to where Nicholas lies, still straddled by the lioness on the floor.

  Cassidy turns to me, and even though she’s a lion right now, her expression is unquestionably accusing. A low growl rips through the air. She’s not threatening me but telling me she’s pissed.

  Nicholas coughs and grabs Cassidy by her sides. “I’m fine, Cassidy.”

  I raise my hands in placation. “Cassidy, Nicholas is fine.”

  She snorts and crouches low over him. He makes a loud ‘humph’ sound, probably from the lioness’ weight. Her large black eyes fix on me, but at least she isn’t growling into my face.

  “What’s the deal?” Linnie asks in a whisper.

  “She’s mad at me for almost getting Nicholas killed,” I guess.

  “Well, maybe she should be mad at him because Albert pretty much arranged our murder this morning, twice. Then Nicholas tried to snatch you against your will and put you back into Albert’s house,” Linnie grumbles into the silence.

  “I was trying to protect you both,” Nicholas says, his voice strained.

  “Sure, you were.” I turn away.

  There’s a quote from Nietzsche I found highlighted in one of the books I stole: ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

  I’d heard it before, in movies or something, but reading it had caused my hands to shake so much that I dropped the book. But now thinking about Nicholas and Albert and all the Leijonskjöld, maybe I should have left them the book with that warning.

  A low cry comes from behind me, but when I turn to look, it’s hushed. The room we stand in probably used to be a living room. Piles of ash and charred chair legs gather in a makeshift fire pit central in the space. Otherwise, no sign of furniture remains.

  The people huddle further into the space, a shivering cluster of bodies in the dark room. The pupils of eyes fix on me before quickly moving away. When I turn back to the windows, I find that though little light escapes in, the dawn illuminates everything outside.

  “Cassidy, you’re crushing me,” Nicholas mumbles.

  The lioness shifts away, and Nicholas rolls over to crouch beside me. He’s a little knocked around, his blond hair messy and eyes somewhat glazed, but otherwise he has no visible injury. His blue eyes meet mine. “I thought you and Cassidy are friends?”

  “We are,” I whisper.

  Cassidy harrumphs as she sits back on her haunches. Obviously, she disagrees.

  Nicholas leans into the curtains before us, his eye to a small crack in the middle.

  I lean in toward Nicholas just a little. “Have you heard anything about a change in orders? I mean, between the soulbound and the demons?”

  He doesn’t look over, and I’m not sure if it’s that he doesn’t hear or he’s ignoring me.

  Beside us, Linnie glares over at Cassidy and begins mumbling, “Maybe Cassidy thinks we should have let them take us and lock us up. They could, say, lock us in a room to fight off one of their soldiers with a gun. And then, when we fight him off, we’ll tell Albert and Nicholas what happened. They’ll ignore what we said and then try to lock us in the same room, alone, with the same armed soldier who tried to kill us. That would be fun. Oh wait, we already did that this morning.”

  “Linnie, quiet,” Nicholas whispers.

  “Really? You’re actually trying to hush me up about this—”

  He looks back from the curtains. “Something is happening out there.” Stepping back, he holds a hand out to me. “Can I have the rifle, Raven?”

  I hesitate only for a second, then hand over the giant rifle weighing down my arm. I don’t know how to use it anyway, and it’s not like he’s going to turn that thing on us. Actually, Nicholas holding that big, bulky thing means he’s a lot less likely to snatch up one of us.

  My arm instantly thanks me, sending tingles all the way up to my shoulder—probably the blood returning into my appendage.

  “And here you go,” Linnie whispers, passing my handgun back. Good thing, too, because the safety was still off. The gun feels too light in my hand after holding the rifle.

  Nicholas again leans in, his eye lit by the crack in the curtain. His eyelid widens and pupil dilates.

  A loud plopping sound surprises us, and we all look upward as thudding echoes across the roof.

  “Is it… raining?” Linnie asks.

  “It’s not rain,” Nicholas whispers.

  The elderly man who let us in gasps beside me, crouching down so he can peer through the open doorknob hole.

  Trying to touch the curtain as little as possible, I lean in, looking through a much smaller crack at the side of the window. I can’t see much, just a sliver of the outside and the street beyond.

  Birds rain from the sky. One hits the lip of the porch before me, its claws outstretched, beak open and eyes bulging out. Beyond the porch, the dark rain falls, piling carcasses onto the overgrown lawn.

  “All the birds are dying,” I say as both Linnie and Cassidy lean in to look through my crack in the curtain.

  A group of twelve men ducks in the rain of corpses, their heads tucked down. Within seconds, the birds almost entirely cover the ground. Wings stick into the air, feathers reaching to the thick gray mist hovering above.

  Then the rain ceases. Our breathing and the soft whimpers from the crowd behind me suddenly echo, even though a moment ago I hadn’t even registered the sounds.

  An out-of-sync disjointed rhythm approaches, and for a moment I can’t identify the sound. The noise is just so out of place here in this time and location, but as the clopping continues, I know I’m hearing the plodding of approaching horses.

  The dead birds shift, but not like living birds. More like an invisible snow plow drives up the street, piling the bodies to either side of the road. Along with the birds, trash and makeshift shelters roll away, revealing people huddled together on the road. The invisible snow plow passes straight through the people and soldiers who still crouch in the center of the street, heads down. The birds and trash feed around them like the tide pulling away from a rocky shore. Mounds push past and pile to each side of the road.

  “Turn away. Don’t look,” Nicholas says, shoving the curtains closed and jumping back.

  It sounds like extremely sensible advice, but at the same time, something in me urges to keep watching out of the small crack between curtains. Mist roils over the naked pavement of the street, a greenish glow threading in with the gray haze. The hoof beats echo closer, a slow, disjointed clopping. As one, the men on the street move, turning away, their hands coming to their faces, palms pressing into their eyes. Fingers splay up from their faces like a strange masquerade mask.

  A heavy tug pulls at my arm, and when I look, a lion is attached to it, her teeth pulling down the sleeve of my sweater.

  I make to turn back to the window, hearing the clopping almost to us, but Cassidy’s teeth pull me again.

  Both Linnie and Nicholas face the other way, their hands pressing into their eyes. Behind us, the entire crowd of crouching people has turned away, facing into the house, their hands pressing into their eyes, fingers splayed up in a strange uniformity of position. It’s as if they’re all forced by some irrepressible impulse, though my instinct tells me to do the opposite. My feet want to take me to the door, to step outside and into the dawn.

  Obviously, Cassidy also follows some other urge because she pulls me further into the living room, a step away from the window. The clopping now booms through our house and keeps going, slowly diminishing as it passes. When there is only a faint e
cho, heads poke up from hands, as if the group all suddenly woke.

  The moment Cassidy releases my sleeve, I peek outside. Mist swirls around people kneeling on the pavement. Mounds of trash and bird carcasses pile up between us, probably three feet deep.

  Simultaneously, the soldier’s hands fall from their faces as they peer around, one of them looking straight at the house.

  Linnie peeks out beside me. “What the hell just happened?”

  My feelings exactly.

  Chapter Five

  Three Days Before

  I turn to the man who let us into the house. He still crouches by the door with his face turned away. Blinking, he lifts his head from splayed hands.

  “Is there another exit?” I ask him.

  His brow furrows as if he doesn’t understand the question, and in the silver glow coming from the door hole, I realize he’s not half as old as I thought he was, probably even younger than my dad.

  “Through the kitchen.” He points into the house.

  Grabbing Linnie’s shoulder, I say, “Come on, we have to go.”

  Linnie blinks around the room, disoriented. Stepping behind her, I push at her back. “Now, Linnie. Cassidy, if you’re still with me, you can come too.”

  Nicholas pulls his rifle to his chest and gives me a serious glare. “Raven, let me help you—”

  “Save it!” Linnie yells as she rushes forward, letting me push her as Cassidy strides ahead.

  Long cracks web up the tile floor of the kitchen. A refrigerator sits open, no light, no cold air radiating from it. Marble slabs crack onto the shattered tile, and jagged bits of wood are all that remain of cupboards. Almost nothing was spared from the foraging for the fire.

  It was so easy to forget while I was watching TV and eating rationed meals that we were probably one of the only houses in town with backup generators and months of food stores, let alone heat.

  Aside from the way we came in, there’s only one outlet from the kitchen, a doorless hole leading down into a pitch-black space. We step down cautiously until the stairs stop abruptly at what feels like a cement floor.