Angel Radio

by A. M. Blaushild

He rolled his head about. “Are you ready for this, though? I’m not sure you’re feeling okay. You seem very stressed.”

  “You’re asking if I’m okay? Not like, if I’m functioning at full emotional capacity?” I laughed far too hard and ended up gripping Fex’s good shoulder for support.

  He didn’t seem confused by my actions. “I don’t want to put this off, but I think you need to rest. You’ve had a long day, and a couple longer days in the past, and all in all I think it’s time you take a rest.”

  “Isn’t Midori going to mess you all up somehow, in whatever never-specified way?”

  “Yes. And similarly, I’m at risk to succumb to my infections. But you can do this alone. I only desire to join you because I miss my home, true form, and body. If I sense I’m losing control while you sleep, I will kill myself duly, and you will continue with your mission. I have faith.”

  “Oi, look at you go!” I laughed again, but nothing he said was of particular humor, and I let it fade out before frowning. “I’m not tired, though. I’m just feeling sort of off-put, unsure, anxious, frightened, and in need of reassurance. Which I guess you can provide. Okay. Let’s do this.” I threw my stuff on the ground, then ran over to pick the lighter up again when it bounced under a car. I sat on the pavement of the motel’s parking lot and invited Fex to sit across from me.

  “I can’t right-put you, or give you confidence or calm your nerves or make you brave,” Fex told me, still standing. “And ‘reassurance’ is intentionally vague, isn’t it?”

  “It’s exactly what you’re good for. Come on, sit across from me already. Let’s make this seem more official.”

  “What is official about sitting in a parking lot like this?”

  “No, it’s the whole across thing. So we can stare dramatically at each other while we speak.” He finally obliged and sat across from me, mimicking my cross-legged position a few seconds later.

  “Now?”

  I sighed. I was actually rather tired, I decided, but my anxiety over what I had seen—or hadn’t seen—in the motel room was keeping me too tense to even think about resting. “Has there, or is there, some sort of radio program run by angels?”

  “No.” He sounded rather unsure, so I tried again.

  “Some sort of mind-linked system where you intentionally spread information about angels to all remaining human survivors, as some sort of test?”

  “No.” He was very sure about that one. In fact, he looked rather shocked I could even think up such an idea.

  “Do you know of any angel by the name of Naomi?”

  “No.”

  “Ada—or Orifiel, actually.”

  “No.”

  “Emil.”

  “No. None of those are particularly angelic names, you know. What are you so worried about?”

  “The phrase ‘Angel Radio,’ does it mean anything at all?” I failed to put effort into my phrasing, and my words ended up coming out a bit slowly and with a higher-pitched squeak.

  “No.”

  I didn’t understand why I was upset. Nor why I was suddenly putting up a poor fight against my tears. I had known this for a long time now, hadn’t I? Midori told it to me, and freaky angel-possessing-corpse girl or not, she hadn’t seemed to be lying back then.

  But it was so much worse this time—maybe it was the quizzical and thoroughly real look Fex was giving me, or the way I had felt my ears rumble under Naomi’s deafening shouts. I stroked my shoulder. Her claws had left no marks, even when I imagined them bleeding. It had been real to me.

  But the reality of the situation now seemed much different: I was a girl who heard voices in the static and got into arguments with myself. I was certainly some level of insane, right? But I didn’t feel crazy. Aren’t you not supposed to know when you are mentally unsound? Because I knew. And I just felt ashamed.

  But mostly there was sobbing. My eyes were strained and squinted, and I told myself to stop. I didn’t listen to myself, though. I just continued being a wreck.

  Fex had some sort of slippery grip on what was going on, but I don’t think angels are capable of empathy. But he did have some working knowledge of sympathy, and his hand hovered an inch from my shoulder, his eyes staring unblinkingly into mine.

  I threw myself against him, not in the proper and perfectly romantic way, but in the sort of way you might try to fling yourself against a wall. And he was roughly equivalent to a wall too, very stiff, a little bit cold, and without much for breath. He tried to continue meeting my gaze, and when I curled my head against his chest, he took my head in his hands, almost like he was ready to lift it up again so he could continue his staring. But he didn’t go through with the movement, and his fingernails dug into my skin.

  At this point I was crying for my sake. I always had been, I suppose. When I found myself on the verge of calmness, I even tried to make myself distressed again, just so I could continue with my sobbing. I thought of everything I could, and everything made me sadder. Even the loss of terrible things made me viciously sad: death because I was never going to go to a relative’s funeral; war because there were no more movies about it; long lines because I was never going to feel frustrated at another human being’s presence ever again.

  It was awful, just awful, but it came to pass whether I wished it to or not. And when I was done, I lifted my head and met Fex’s unchanging and concerned gaze. His hands continued to grip my head in a most uncomfortable way.

  “But what is this all about?”

  “I’ve been hearing voices in my head for a long time now.” My voice was still rather shaky.

  “Oh,” Fex said. “Me too.”

  “It’s different for you, though. I’m walking around here talking with myself like a madwoman, hallucinating images and sounds and feelings… I even made up a story to help convince myself it was all real. How ridiculous is that? I wanted so badly to believe in my own mind that I constructed some bizarre narrative just to satisfy myself.”

  He pursed his lips but said nothing.

  “Don’t look at me like that! You only talk to yourself. You are yourself, and you’re fine with it because it’s what you’re supposed to be. I’m not used to—I’m not supposed to imagine monsters, and frankly, I’m sort of left with the doubt that any of this is real! You could be just another imaginary companion—”

  He interrupted my rant. “I’m not.”

  “Yeah, okay, but Orifiel seemed pretty real to me when she was hanging round too. So you know, I’m feeling a little like I’m leaning on the edge of a pit here. I’m on the brink, and my head hurts, and I want to eat some actually fresh food, and I really, really want to pet a dog right now.”

  “Sit calmly. If I could take on your pain for you, I would, because I would like nothing more than to not be alone in my mind anymore. But I understand why you’re troubled. And I fear I can’t help you with it—not once and not at all. But maybe you’ll figure it out, eventually. So please, try to breathe and take a rest, and do your best to focus on the future instead of the past. I need to save Eden from Midori, and you need to save Midori from Eden, and together we share a simple and comforting goal.”

  I exhaled. His fingers were still rather tightly gripping my scalp, but he had eased up slightly. “Yeah, okay, whatever.” I leaned forward and kissed him, but really it was more of a car crash with my lips, a rather desperate and ill-thought-out attempt at something I had no name for. Fex didn’t seem to have a name for it either. Again he was best compared to a wall—though his fingers had loosened on my head and had slipped slightly down to my shoulders, it seemed more to have been a reactionary accident.

  I backed off and found myself falling into a position that reflected my feelings about the kiss: well, that was awkward. Fex seemed mostly confused, but he permitted me to rather stupidly try to kiss him again. This time I placed my fingers lightly against his skull and tried a little bit harder, and Fex in turn copied me.

  It was a slightly better kiss in the end, I guess, but I wa
sn’t sure I liked it, or that I really liked him. I mean, liked him in any sort of sexual or romantic way. I felt very stupid about kissing him immediately after I had finished, and while his gaze suggested he was up for trying it out again, I knew there wasn’t much point to it, and I shook his fingers off my skin and stood up again.

  “What was that?” he asked, following me out of the parking lot. “I am aware of it, naturally, this kissing business, but it is always important to add more context and details to my memory.”

  “What, are you now trying to flirt with me?” I laughed. Despite everything, I was somehow in a much better mood. “Do you want to make out again?”

  He had a bit of a giggle when he spoke as well, and a slight stammer. “Not really. But you know—I may be just one facet of a giant single-mind that’s taken over your world and killed your species, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t feel anything at all. I mean that mostly in a physical sense, but maybe emotional.”

  “Oh, so you totally just got a boner for me now? I’m not really feeling it myself.” I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at my own joke, and though Fex was doing his best to sound calm, I suspected he was holding back his weird laughter too. As I crossed the streets of the town on my way back to Eden, I was again looking for a weapon—but now it was with a sort of light air that I searched, and I spun about and flung things every which way as I did so, humming.

  “I’m not familiar with every word you say, though the use of it suggests something that is probably not true about myself—but uh, look, I’m just wondering what all this has been about? Don’t leave a dying soul on the hook here, please.”

  “You’re so clingy.” I was talking to Fex mostly without looking, but I caught his eye when I spoke, and he looked at the ground, seeming rather embarrassed. I was joking, though, and he knew that, and I did another princess-worthy twirl as I tossed a heavy suitcase from the street through a store window.

  “At least you’re feeling better,” he said, seeming resigned. “I’m glad about that.” And he gave me a sort of fed up and affectionate smile.

  “I just hope you’re not expecting anything else from me.”

  “Expecting?”

  “Love,” I said idly.

  “Ah,” he said. “I’d just like to know where things stand. I mean, that was certainly an experience—any chance we’ll do that again? Just asking.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about trying to sound justified here—I don’t care. But no.” I found a bat, among other things, on an empty baseball diamond. I tossed it in my hands a few times. It was the perfect weight. “Definitely not. Simplicity is a virtue, you know.”

  Fex scoffed under his breath that it wasn’t, but caught himself midway through, and joined in with my half-forced laughter.

  27

  EDEN WAS not pitch black in the dark. It glowed, with patches of teal light spread across the whole of its white wall. The angels never seemed to sleep, but they had gathered for the night in the trees and on top of Eden itself, and they too seemed to give off light. But it may have been a trick of the night sky—after all, many of them had a sort of prismatic quality to their bodies.

  It took a while to find the entrance I had dug through the stringy wall. Fex had started to lag behind as we climbed the hill, and at the top he fell against Eden’s wall to catch his breath.

  “I’ll last,” he promised. “But I’ll be dead before the next sunrise.” He had wrapped the infected part of his face up again as we had ascended.

  “How am I going to know when I have to kill you?” I asked. I did not want to kill Fex in the slightest, though I figured there probably wasn’t another option. I was going to have to, or maybe he’d do it himself, but either way he was going to die. And it would help me now if I remembered that: there was no need to grieve him. It was going to happen. Best to appreciate him now while I could.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve seen it happen. I’ll probably start making some weird noises, and lose control of my shape-shifting,” he said. “Hm.”

  “Hm?”

  “Well, you know, it’s not like I technically have to die when I become a carapace. In fact, we’re not supposed to hurt them at all if we can help it. That’s why I was holding back so much when we were in the void.”

  “That’s convenient. So why do you keep telling me to kill you? You were about set to do it yourself, actually.”

  “The thing about carapaces is simple—they’re just our corrupted bodies. Our consciousness—or rather the piece of the Metatron we were loaned when we were born—is still alive in there. It’s just likewise corrupted, and acting mostly on instinct and who knows what else. But it can be cured—it’s just not something you would want to hear about. Or would even consider.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s exactly what we’ve been hoping to achieve this whole time: perfection. We were searching for the ideal human female for this very purpose—”

  “Hold up.” I narrowed my eyes. “You specifically need a girl to do this?”

  “Yes. In fact, we only left women in our eradications. After the male population was removed, we began to narrow down the survivors in our efforts to find the perfect woman.”

  “I know this is a terrifying thought and millions of people died for it, but wow does it sound like some sort of dating show. The search for the perfect woman!” I laughed. “Okay. I’m done. Continue with your creepy plan.”

  “We needed a female,” Fex explained. “Because last time we did this we needed a male. It’s a balance. Next time we’ll need a male, and so on, and so forth. When our chosen subject achieves perfection, they revive us and grant us—the Metatron us, I mean—the power needed to cure the carapaces and revitalize fully.”

  “Why do you even have the carapace demon creatures anyway? Why do you have to go through this process so many times?” I wasn’t really thinking about the implications of it, either. Was Fex saying the angels were aliens of some sort, who traveled from planet to planet to do this? And how disappointing was it that other alien races also just had male and female? I was really hoping for some more exciting sexes.

  Fex looked rather slyly at me, and I suspected he was proud of his kind, or himself, for this plan. “All things must die. It’s in the cells—they can’t replicate perfectly forever. No matter is infinite. But with this, we simply refresh. We renew. We recycle our selves. And all it takes is a proper genetic match and a bit of time.”

  “So you’d just… suck the life out of whoever you choose? Like a giant, more monstrous vampire?”

  “Quite the contrary!” Fex said with glee. “Those we choose do not die—we become them. Only parts of our past selves remain—the faintest of memories and instructions for what to do when the time for rebirth is at hand again. We are our chosen, and they become us.”

  “So that’s what you’d do with Midori, then? Make her one of you?”

  “Midori is dead, Erika. If I were to live—if you really wanted me to—you would have to be the one to attain perfection. There’s no one else around—and the cloud of void and carapaces is growing ever closer.” Fex grinned at me. “Though of course, once you did this, you wouldn’t really be saving me anymore—you’d be saving yourself. I know you just want to save Midori and leave—and in fact, I encourage it. But if you really wanted to, you could take her place and become one with me.”

  I shivered—it was like a series of twitches and movements and a face being turned away, and it wasn’t even cold out.

  “What happens to the demons if I remove Midori and abandon you?”

  “They seize hold of the Metatron. All angels become carapaces. The world becomes void and then rots away.”

  “You’re not leaving me an option here, are you?” And he had seemed so helpful just an hour prior. I didn’t want to die a bizarre death at the hands of some demon, but I really didn’t want to fuse with a creepy omni-soul. Maybe if I just died at the end of the process—maybe that would have b
een okay.

  “No, there’s some hope. I don’t want you to feel forced. If Midori forces herself into the Metatron, she’ll have the same effect as the carapaces would have had. She must go as soon as possible. But once you remove her, there is a period of time where we’ll be safe again, and the search can resume for another suitable candidate. I just hope we still have a couple left alive—the approach of the void is a rather consistent thing, I’m afraid. Considering how close it’s gotten, we must have lost a number of our survivors.” He glumly looked down. “It’s okay, though. We can use someone less than ideal in dire emergencies.”

  “This is surreal.” I shook my head, then laughed. “What a thing to say, huh? Like that’s anything new. This whole thing is expected at this point.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” I helped him to his feet. “We still have work to do.”

  IT WAS dark inside Eden. The lights on the outside didn’t even bleed through in the slightest, and my lighter didn’t have enough light to let me see anything.

  Luckily Fex knew exactly where we were. There didn’t seem to be any walls around us, but he wove a twisty route in the darkness, leading me by a firm grip on my wrist. In my other hand I held my baseball bat ready, but nothing seemed to be stirring.

  “You’ve placed us rather far from our destination,” Fex said, before suddenly jerking me to the side.

  “Ouch!” I said reflexively as I stumbled to catch my balance. “Why can’t we just walk in a straight line? Is there even anything in here?”

  “I’m opposed to this sort of thing,” Fex said with a bit of a mumble. He let go of my wrist, and I couldn’t see what he was doing. “But I’ll be careful.”

  Then I could see—or at least, I could see what his hands were doing. From between them a light was growing. He nurtured it protectively, before finally tossing it about an inch above his outstretched hands, where it hovered.

  It didn’t provide much illumination, but I had a feeling he was holding his power back to prevent any harm from coming to Eden—and I could see why he might be wary. The space we were walking in was mostly empty, but slightly smaller than I had thought. To the right was another great mass of something, a sort of bluish-black and unidentifiable shape separate from the whiteness of everything else.