Angel Radio

by A. M. Blaushild

  My bag way back in the field, and the only things I had on hand were my matches and lighters. But nature does provide some bounty—I grabbed a good-size rock and stood ready.

  I dove under one of the Ophanim—there was maybe only a foot of space between its burning body and the ground, and my skin grew hot. It was no better when I stood up—I was instantly sweating like crazy, and my vision became blurry.

  Under its body was not quite lit, but more like starlight. Some light was also let in its neck hole, through which I could see its ringed head.

  I readied my rock—how hard could this be? I had a pretty good arm for tossing things, and it was pretty much a straight shot. Besides those interlocking rings, but I was wishing for the best of luck on that one.

  I threw it as hard as I could, and it bounced right off and came flying straight down. I picked it up for another shot, and this time it bounced away, well out of my reach.

  How far away was Fex now? The Ophan did not stop moving, but its head did start to descend—and I had the queasy sort of feeling that things were becoming the wrong size, because its head was much larger than it had looked from the ground. Its skull-adorned face lowered itself to my level, and its wings parted to show its humanlike face, eyes the size of my splayed hands.

  I went ahead and just punched it. It didn’t respond in any way, its wings flapping once or twice whenever its head got too close to the ground moving slowly forward.

  It was too hot for me to keep up my pathetic punching for much longer. “Ugh,” I grunted, falling red-faced and fevered to the ground. “Why won’t you just die?” I moaned.

  My breath was heavy, and colder than the air around it. I rolled onto the dirt, which felt like coal against my skin.

  I was going to fall unconscious at this rate, and then Fex would die, and then I would die, or maybe I’d die first and then Fex would. Someone was going to die, though….

  Music rang in my ears, a thousand choral voices, and I lost myself to blackness.

  25

  I AWOKE without much fanfare or recognition—I just suddenly was, and though my head was heavy, I sat up and shook it off.

  I had been moved slightly to the side, but otherwise nothing had really changed. The sun was beginning to set with a rather boring-looking yellow hue, and Fex was standing quite unharmed across from me.

  “You’ve been out for a while.” He made no effort to help me up, and I stood up on my own.

  “I gathered as much. Feeling less like suicide, then?”

  “Please. I’m always going to be alive.” He gestured to Eden. “Just not with this consciousness. Isn’t it in your best interest anyway that I die? You know, so all my memories die with me?”

  “You haven’t even seen anything that scandalous. I’m not sweating. And besides, I need you alive. Probably. Hey, what did you do with those Ophanim anyway?” There wasn’t a sign of a struggle, not even a couple strands of burnt grass.

  “I called them off; what else? As long as I didn’t show my face to them, they were all the willing to oblige. Besides, you really think I’d pointlessly kill my own just to save your life?”

  “I’m under the impression you saved my life either way, so I don’t really care.”

  “I still need you alive.” He shrugged. “You know, to remove Midori before she kills us all. Also, don’t you think you’re forgetting something?”

  His elaborate series of fanning hand gestures and wide grin made me sigh. “Thank you. It’s not like I was putting off saying it to be mean to you, by the way. I mean that quite genuinely. Now don’t die while I’m gone.”

  I was still feeling a bit woozy, but I figured that’d be gone by the time I found Midori. I dug for a lighter and prepared to depart.

  “At the rate you handle things, I’m probably better off joining you. You know, so you don’t burn to death.”

  I glared at him.

  He backed off. “Hey, just making a joke here. I’ve seen the way you’ve killed things. You’ve got a real knack for survival.”

  “Wait—are you implying I’m going to have to kill Midori?”

  “We’ll see. Or, you’ll see. But I trust you to make the truest judgment—or do you want me to ‘hold your hand’ throughout? I mean that in a sarcastic, expression-y way, to clarify, definitely not a literal one.”

  “Oh, you know just the things to say to a girl to make her heart flutter!” I said. “Are you, like, passive-aggressively asking me to ask you to come along? I thought you were going to explode into a demon at any second.”

  “I never said that. A more accurate guess would be any minute, and it’s not like there’d be no warning signs. You should just kill me when I start to turn, and we’ll be fine.” His eyes lit up suddenly. “And if you really insist, of course I’ll accompany you into Eden! It is rather dark and hard to navigate. Especially when you’re heading right to the heart.”

  “Oh, shut up.” He got up and stood next to me, waiting for me to enter. “Actually, I have one more thing to take care of. Probably shouldn’t go in there unarmed, right?”

  “Do you have a weapon in mind?”

  “Fire has always worked. Almost always. But it still stands as my best bet. But—”

  “Fire is hard to control. And you can’t harm the Metatron.”

  “Yes. So I’m just going to skip down to the ski lodge. Be right back.”

  “Can’t I join you for that?”

  I paused. While I was considering bringing some sort of ski pole or fire safety axe back with me, I was really more interested in finding a radio to contact Ada or Naomi with.

  Actually, Ada was likely hiding in the trees nearby. But it still wouldn’t hurt to see if Angel Radio was on, and usually the only way to achieve that was with a radio.

  I didn’t want to explain it to Fex, though, fearful he might judge me for… what? It was a program that was evidently sponsored by him, or the Metatron, or whatever. Like he wouldn’t already know about it. I just felt oddly ashamed to discuss it with him.

  “Private reasons,” I settled on saying.

  “Nothing is private anymore. Come on. I know about weapons. I know what to expect in there.”

  “You can just tell me, for once.”

  “It’s more fun this way.”

  I exhaled heavily. “Okay. But if I need alone time, promise to go away for a couple minutes.”

  “Do skis make you too emotional to function?” Fex wondered aloud. I didn’t bother to answer.

  I was honestly glad of Fex’s presence—it beat being alone and mopey. But I didn’t care to speak much along the way down the hill. The air was rapidly cooling off, and the sun disappeared in such a sudden fashion that by the time I realized it was dark I also realized I had no memory of seeing the sun set—it had just happened.

  The ski lodge ended up being fairly close to the weblike mass of Eden, and it became apparent when I reached the bottom of the hill that it had been mostly swallowed by the white wall of the Metatron’s exterior. I continued instead down the road a bit more and went into the nearest motel.

  “This isn’t a ski lodge,” Fex observed. At least now I sort of understood how he knew things about human lives—if the Metatron was constantly reabsorbing and dispersing angels to collect information, they must have seen almost all the world by now. And Fex was tapped right into it all, likely receiving information without being truly aware of its flow.

  All those thousands and millions of angels constantly observing everything must have learned to read a sign or two. Their knowledge could still best be described as laughable, but at least Fex seemed to have a very basic grip on what skiing was.

  “This is a motel,” I informed him. “Temporary housing for people on the move.”

  “I know that,” Fex scolded. “I mean, it’s not a ski lodge, which is where you said we were heading. A ski lodge can also be temporary housing for moving people, or people who were once moving on their skis but have since stopped for rest.”

&nb
sp; “Wow. You’re really a font of information. It’s almost like reading a book about ski lodges, or I guess, getting one read aloud to you.”

  “Skiing is a recreational sport that shares certain sacred mountains with snowboard practitioners. There are no snowboard lodges anywhere to be found, however.”

  “I’m really learning a lot,” I said, doing my best to amp up the sarcasm in case he had missed it the first time.

  He took no notice, and stared darkly into my eyes as he spoke, dead serious. “Skiers practice their art with certain aerodynamic planks that are attached to the feet and long arm-extending poles that direct their movement.”

  “Okay, Fex, I get it. You’ve… read a book or something on skiing. Or maybe made some guesses based on the pictures? Because I’m not sure you have your facts down one hundred percent.”

  “After a great game of ski, the artists will descend to their lodges for the ceremonial drinking of hot beverages,” He said offhand, sounding offended. “This is to heat their cold and fragile bodies. If it is sunny out, it is meant to ward off evil spirits.”

  “This place is rather empty, isn’t it?” I said in an attempt to distract him. It was true, however. It had been the off-season for winter sports, but surely a few of the rooms would be full? I was looking mostly for weapons, but I couldn’t help notice how untouched the place was.

  It was just a dinky motel, though, and not a place that should seem eerie if it looked abandoned. It just felt sad, though still carrying a twinge of creepiness. A sink sat full of water. A plate had been dropped on the floor. There was a dead dog chained up in the backyard.

  But no corpses could be found in any of the rooms. The angels didn’t eat humans, last time I checked—well, some obviously had, but most lacked anything resembling a mouth. But those bodies had to have gone somewhere.

  I was so used to being left alone to solve these mysteries that I almost forgot I was in the company of one entirely capable of solving them all.

  “Why are there so few bodies, anyway? Do you guys move them?”

  “Move? Yes. In a way. We carried them away.”

  “Dead?”

  “Of course.” He spoke like he was scolding me. “What other way could we move them?”

  “So, why do you do that?”

  “Well, you’ll find out, I guess, fairly soon. It will be a subject covered in our trek through Eden.”

  “I feel like you have some sort of thing about withholding information. Do you get off on it? Are you even capable of getting off, come to think of it?”

  He raised and lowered his eyebrows without changing his expression from an unnaturally wide smile. “I don’t know those terms. Are you armed and having private time yet?”

  “No.” I waved him off. “Go outside for like ten minutes. Shoo.”

  He obliged, and I quickly found what I needed: a knife from one of the rooms, another new lighter to keep in my pocket, and an AM radio. Then I settled onto one of the beds, and after I was done sneezing off the dust, I put the radio in front of me and turned it on.

  Music played—it was a tune I knew, a pop song with lyrics that held long out over the vowels and featured a high number of cymbal crashes. I tuned it, each channel yielding an equally strong and familiar channel that struck me as comforting. An old commercial jingle played on one of the stations, and I listened with ardent intensity. For a moment I was on the verge of what felt like remembrance, of an autumn day spent in a cold car, watching the breeze sway the wilds….

  I caught myself. An old memory sat on the brink of my mind. That long-ago day, and the next, spent listening to the radio while the policeman spoke outside. Someone brought me hot chocolate. Before my parents had died, I had listened to the radio every night. After those days of waiting in cars and lobbies, I had stopped.

  I spun through the channels again. None led to Angel Radio.

  How did the ghostly channel even work? It usually seemed to happen when I was using an actual radio, but it hadn’t always… and surely it wasn’t even related to the radio to start with. It was mass telepathy of some sort, and maybe it was rather silly of me to feel convinced the radio had ever been part of it—like a soccer player convinced what socks they wore affected the game’s outcome.

  But even as I thought it, the radio faded and crackled, and I was left with a message:

  “Hello. Welcome to Angel Radio. Today’s weather is going to be dreadful, rain and fog as long as they can come. Perhaps school will be canceled tomorrow. I do hope so. It’s been so long since we’ve had a snow day—we didn’t have one over the summer, not one at all.”

  It was the voice of Emil, and it was not trying to hide itself in the static any longer. It was in my mind, all of it was at once, and I doubled over at first to try and contain it. I was overwhelmed with pain worse than a migraine, and by the time my brain was done bursting, I saw darkness and I was dizzyingly unsteady.

  “Hello again, and welcome to another day and another round of field notes—what is that? Where is it going? There? At this hour? Is that fire on its back? Are those eyes on its wings? What manner of peculiar is all this? And how, very much how, can I draw it?”

  And now it was the radio speaking to me, a booming and shaking apparition straight out of a cartoon—and even now it was changing further. The radio unfolded and extended and shifted until it resembled something I recalled having to doodle once in math class—a hypercube, a moving mechanism bordering on the fourth dimension. But the fourth dimension is time, isn’t it? You can’t just sit on the brink of time any more than you can sit on the brink of the second dimension. Physics just won’t allow it.

  The sight of this physics-breaking atrocity made me very uneasy, and my eyes itchy and dry. And then it finished its dance of intersecting and changing, and like a kernel of popcorn it exploded—just a little jump really, but it was enough to puff it up slightly and allow a black slime to swirl out.

  “It’s cold out, but I’m not going to find myself a sweater. I could learn a skill by book reading, I suppose, but it’s a lot of work. And nothing is quite how it looks in the books, is it? It’s pointless. And those angels—” The voice, Emil, was speaking as the radio continued to change. I wasn’t sure if I could place the pronoun “he” on the voice at this point—it had a certain masculinity still, but as the black slime shaped itself into something with a human semblance, the voice changed too. It was lighter, and wholly familiar.

  “Those angels!” it continued. “Those angels! Those devils, those monsters, those demons, those foes! If I had a fist and a gun and a couple angels and a dark back alley, those angels would exist no more. Those angels, those angels, those angels!” It kept its metallic nature, both in appearance and in voice—the body was perhaps more a shimmering onyx, and the voice still sounded like it was coming from the speakers of the radio. Indeed, the body held the radio up to its chest and let its voice ring out. Each time it spoke it reused its old words, like the audio equivalent of a magazine-cutout hostage letter.

  When it was done, it held the radio to its mouth and tilted its head, short hair tilting with it and falling in a certain painful way.

  “It is rather nice out here, without the cars and without the boats, without the train whistle at two and twelve every afternoon, and without the people. It is rather nice. And awfully, awfully boring—but that will never get to me unless I let it. The world is my—” The voice shook, the body shook, and I shook. “Those angels,” it said like a broken record, the same sad tone each time. “Those angels, those angels. Those angels, those angels, those angels.”

  My eyes were burning, my mouth was dry, and I think somewhere in the mess I had begun to cry. An awfully overwhelming sensation of agitation rose from my stomach, and I stabbed the radio creature. I had to. I tore its body open and saw stars, not like those in the sky but more like the kind I saw when I closed my eyes very tightly and looked very closely—lines of negative space and spots of an invisible hue fell out like cotton stuffing an
d did not bother to collect on the bed. And when I had torn the odd thing open, the perfect mirrorlike body split and spilled and ripped like fabric, there was just the radio.

  With a knife in it.

  And the knife stuck out a bit, because with all my force I hadn’t been able to pierce it very deeply.

  I did not collect the knife—the lighter was going to have to be enough for today. And I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be hearing from Ada or Naomi or Emil anytime soon, or very honestly, ever again.

  Fex stood at the doorway and picked at his nails with his teeth. He bit, chewed, and spat them out onto the dusty red floor.

  “A religious rite?” he asked with his ever-present vaguely curious air. But he did not look up from his hands. “A prayer?”

  His grasp on humanity was never going to be perfect.

  26

  I DIDN’T want to talk to Fex, but he either didn’t get my cue or had chosen to ignore it.

  “You look ill. Not comparatively ill, of course, at least when compared to how much of a mess I currently am. But for your own standards, you seem quite ill.”

  “You sure have a way with words,” I sang halfheartedly in a soft voice.

  “Oh, see that is pleasant and all, but it is not like you.” As he spoke he fell to singing his words as well, in a curious and awed way. He then experimented singing a variety of words. I stopped paying attention at “low streaked tenrec.”

  “We’re going to now fight the—whatever it is,” I reminded him, and he snapped out of his musical episode.

  “We’re not fighting anything. The only fighting will be in the case of you having to put me down before I infect Eden. We are going to remove Midori from the system, like a bloodsucking tick.”

  “Are there non-bloodsucking ticks?”