Your heart had thrilled. You had been thrilled by the flight, by his power and control, by his absolute otherness. Could Alex have given you that? Could anyone in your city? This was something unknown and unknowable, something happening to you and you alone. Was there a purpose in this? After all, you had always wanted to know more than the people around you, the city, its rituals and routines. You wanted to know the rest of this world and the world beyond—his world. You wanted to be in this cave and on this mountaintop, and you wanted to see the next. He was beautiful, truly beautiful, and you wanted to pull his beauty inside you and have it light your every pore from the inside. The first night he raped you. Even though you didn’t fight, of that you were sure. But in the most desperately hidden corners of your heart, you can’t deny that you wanted more than his food that second night.
Samael brought more food with him upon his return, and for the first time, conversation. Later, as you lay against the curve of his side and hip, warm in the white light, he must’ve sensed some change in you and spoke to you as a man might. The things he said made little immediate impact, but you’ve never forgotten them.
“I’m not supposed to be here, little Kendra.”
“You mean here with me?”
He turned to you and grinned in his nearly human way. “Not on this planet.”
You said nothing for a long time, your heart beating hard in your chest. “Do you feel you’re, um, meant to be here?”
His gray eyes looked almost confused. “It is my will.”
You rose up on your elbow to face him. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, is there a higher purpose to your being here now?”
“How does one so young ask so many profound questions?”
You tucked a lock of hair behind your ear. “We’re considered adults by my age. We’re supposed to think about bigger things.”
He sat up, shaking his head. “No, little Kendra. You’re something far more than a well-trained parrot. You are without fear.”
“I ran from you when I first saw you.”
“To survive, but not out of fear,” he continued. “You ask questions of one that others would bow before. Your eyes are . . . old. Is that the right human word? It will have to do until I think of another.”
You grinned, all pride and embarrassment, and bit your lower lip. “So if you’re not supposed to be here, why are you?”
He lay back down. “Those among my people who saved your race from the Rebels believe they are wise. They believe in guarding over you rather than interfering with you. They believe that by keeping apart from you, you will be able to find the best parts of yourselves more easily. Some of us, however, feel that it is important not to entirely abandon the old policy of . . . occasional interaction.”
“You said you knew others of my race. Who?”
“The mother of your race, for one. And many others.”
“The mother—” You searched his face. “I don’t understand. Many others?”
He sighed. “I am very old. And there have been many women.” He traced a hand from your shoulder to your upper arm, goose-bumping the flesh. “But none like you. Never anyone like you.” The lustful admiration in his face brightened into something greater. “You almost make me wish I were human.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think religion runs so strongly among your people, despite the fact that your science was once great enough to disprove so many of your original concepts of the universe? Why does it persist now, despite the despair you must have felt knowing your race was all but destroyed? It’s because greater beings have walked among you from time to time and you have stood by them almost as equals, despite your mortality, despite your lack of knowledge, despite your innate fears. And you did so because of faith. Your faith endures because human beings must strive to overcome their weaknesses—and their weaknesses help them believe that things can get better through will and faith. They either find a way to overcome or die. Your faith is your greatest gift, and it is something utterly lacking in beings like myself. For those of us who are less ignorant, faith is the most remarkable attribute a thinking being can demonstrate.”
You said nothing. The silence washed over you comfortably. Finally: “How’s that got anything to do with me?”
Now he laughed, and when he did it was good-natured and almost human sounding. He took your hands and kissed them. “Oh Kendra! Your faith is greater than any other being’s I have ever encountered. It etches your whole being and lights you from inside. I see you and wish I could possess but a taste of it.”
You looked at his large orange hands surrounding yours as they rested in your naked lap. Your cuticles were bloody where you’d picked at them, your nails ragged, your palms coarse from manual labor. And his hands were pristine, perfect.
“Samael?”
“Yes?”
“Is this—this between us—God’s plan for me?”
He gave your knee a gentle squeeze. The movement sent a not-unpleasant shiver up your leg. “Of that I have no doubt.”
Intimacy. You learned the true meaning of that word in those three days, didn’t you? On the first day you learned how exposed and ashamed another could make you feel. And on the other two days—when Samael almost never left your side because you didn’t want him to—you learned how willing you were to bare yourself completely.
And that’s what he was to you, wasn’t he? Samael was a man because he made you feel like the woman everyone in the city claimed you now were but hadn’t let you be.
What made him a man to you? The way he ran a hand down your bare hip as you straddled him? His smell? His taste? Or was it his very inhumanness—the curve of those translucent wings draping you as if you were inside a blue tent—that made him seem like more of a man than any true man you had ever met?
Maybe it was none of the physical things at all. You left the cave and walked the hills with him in the morning light, pointing out trees and plants you had never seen, flowers in bloom, birds slicing in arching curves through the air. You bathed together in a mountain stream and told him about your secret childhood dreams of seeing other worlds as the Remnants had done in humanity’s last days. He never once seemed bored by what you were saying. In fact, he hung on your every word. Then he tried to describe the way this world looked from high above, gave up on his description, and snatched you up in his arms to show you. Three massive sweeps of his wings and your chilled, wet skin was dry in the warm summer sun as you soared over vistas as beautiful as the ones you had seen on that first night, only now throbbing in brilliant daytime colors.
His wings were now your wings. You felt as if you were the woman described in Revelation who was given eagle’s wings so she could be nourished for a time in the wilderness.
He turned you in midflight to face him. As you kissed you laughed in your throat—thrilled like a fool—unwilling to think about anything more than the next moment. He crushed you against him, and you felt his heat against you as he brought you down to a field springing with white wildflowers, where you thought of nothing but the grass beneath you, Samael above you, and the warmth of the sunlight as it shone in a bluish hue through his translucent wings.
“No more,” you begged with a grin after a long while.
He kissed your neck. “Oh no, little Kendra. I’m not finished yet. Hours and hours,” he said, and you grew suddenly fearful, “before I’m sated.”
“Hey! Hey!”
You’d hardly heard the cry when Samael got off you and whirled around. Two rapid cracks echoed against the trees in quick succession. Samael slumped back on top of you. A warm liquid was pouring over you. You screamed and scratched and pushed and finally managed to slide yourself out from beneath him. You ran from the field, naked and bruised, your breath sharp in your chest until you stumbled face-first into the grass. You reached down and pulled a jagged branch from your heel and tried to stand. You winced and staggered forward and saw blood spattered on the white flowers by your feet. Out of the co
rner of your eye, a figure was running toward you, a carbine in hand.
“Kendra! Kendra McQueen!”
The sound of your name coming from a human voice dropped you back to the ground. As you tried to hide your nakedness with your arms, a leather jacket whipped across the air and covered you whole. Your gaze found a mustache, wire-frame glasses, short dark thick hair, a familiar face.
“Colonel Weiss?”
He squeezed your hand. “You’re going to be okay now, kid.” He held you tight against his barrel chest, but you could still see Samael immobile on the ground.
No.
It wasn’t possible.
“He was an angel.” Your voice was far away, flattened. “You killed an angel.”
Weiss gripped your face between his two hands. His hands were slick with the thin, reddish liquid that had burst from Samael onto you but still didn’t quite seem like blood. “No, not an angel. It was a Hostile. No true guardian would do this to you.”
You tried to look away, at Samael, at the life you almost had.
“Kendra, listen to me. I swear to you,” he said. “I swear it was not whatever it told you it was. You have to believe me. Those things lie about everything.”
“He said I was special.” Your mouth quivered, but you didn’t cry. “He said I was unique.”
Weiss stroked your matted hair as a father might. “You’ll survive this,” he growled. “You’ll grow stronger. And someday you’ll prove to the world that there is no one like Kendra McQueen.”
Weiss. The thought of him brought Kendra back to herself, to the cellar, to the earth under her fingers. She had to get out, find him. A rodent ran across her bare forearm in the dark. She lashed out, grabbed it, then flung it toward where she thought the far wall was. A thud in the dark, nearer than she expected, then silence.
She had to get loose. She ran her manacled hands down her body and almost punched herself because of her stupidity. In a moment she had unbuckled and slipped off her belt.
Amateurs. Stupid. So stupid. Almost as stupid as I’ve been.
Ten minutes later, belt buckle in hand, the manacles were off her wrists. Two minutes after that she had popped the lock that had kept her feet chained to the wall.
She would be ready for them.
CHAPTER 20
That sound she knew.
A popping of thick wooden dead bolts being pulled back, then the heavy bar being lifted from its brackets on the door. Kendra snapped out of her combat nap and found the hiding place she had probed with her fingers just an hour or so before. With a heave, she pulled herself up and into it.
Ignore the light. Don’t be blinded by it. Follow the sound.
The door creaked open. She could hear the undisciplined giggles of teenagers on the other side, one female, the other hoping to be male when his voice finally changed.
“Quiet. You know we’re not supposed to talk in front of her.”
God, grant me strength.
The sound of boots on the landing was dry and scratchy, tracked-in dirt on wood planking. She counted off the seconds in her head. The light from outside had probably reached the back corner of the cellar where she was supposed to be chained up.
“What the—”
Bingo.
She cleared her throat and they looked up. Kendra was braced between the ceiling beams above the top of the staircase near the door.
“Hiya.”
Kendra leapt down, swinging the manacles in her right hand, and connected with the female Novice’s forehead. With her left foot she kicked the male Novice down the flight of steps before him, his carbine sailing in a wide arc in the opposite direction to the dirt floor below. Her foot caught in his jacket, and she found herself being pulled along by his momentum down the steps. She knew falls like this and relaxed instinctively to shield herself from the worst of it.
Two seconds later her human surfboard was immobile on the dirt floor. She was up on her feet trying with squinted eyes to find his carbine in the semidarkness. A rustling sound above her told her she didn’t have time. She pounced back up the wooden steps two at a time and grabbed the ankles of the female Novice, who was trying to crawl to an escape. After a quick look through the doorway suggested no one was waiting in the Khans’ kitchen, she snatched the girl’s sidearm from its holster, shoved it against her temple, then pulled her down the cellar steps by the back of her curly brownish-red hair, now generously streaked with blood.
Kendra ripped the nub of a candle out of the girl’s pocket and tossed her face-first to the floor next to her comrade. She lit the candle with the girl’s matches and set it on the ground, then scanned the area for the carbine. There it was—in the back corner she had been chained to, not far from the chamber pot. She slung the rifle over her shoulder by its leather strap, kept the sidearm in her right hand, and picked the chamber pot up with her left.
Kendra stood over them in the flickering candlelight. The girl’s eyes were unfocused, maybe a concussion, but she was groaning and half-awake. Sure the boy was faking unconsciousness, she dumped the contents of the pot on his face.
“Jesus Christ!” he sputtered as he sprang into a sitting position. “Jesus Christ!”
“Lord’s name.” Kendra smirked and then gave his face a close examination. “I know you, you little fucker. You’re Daniel Hernandez. You were in Captain Giordano’s company two years ago.”
“Look, please don’t—”
“And you copped a feel off me when you dumped me down here.”
“Please.” He wiped piss from his eyes and groaned as he tried to sit up. “Please, please don’t kill me.”
“Anyone else upstairs, Danny boy?”
“No, no.”
Kendra squatted and felt his leg. He had fractured his shinbone, but it didn’t appear too serious. She leaned her knee on the broken bone, and he screamed. His voice was somehow more masculine just then.
She glanced up at the door, a serene look on her face. Nope, he wasn’t lying.
“You know, little fucker, this break isn’t too bad. I think it’ll set just fine. Unless it gets worse. Then they’ll have to amputate.” She jerked her chin at him. “You ever see an amputation?”
He shook his head.
“They say they’ve got some kind of anesthetic now, but I dunno. Last one I saw, the guy bit clean through the block of wood they had set between his teeth. And most of his tongue.”
“God, please—”
She leaned over him, her breath on his face, her breast against his chest. “Wanna cop a feel now?”
He looked away from her. “You’re crazy, crazy.”
“Yup. And I’m the one with the boots and the guns. So why don’t you do you and your little girlfriend here a favor and tell me where I can find John Giordano?”
“I don’t know.” Tears were rising in his almost-black eyes. “I swear.”
She stood up, pressed her toe into his shinbone, and he screamed.
“I swear I don’t know!”
“Then tell me where I can find your master, little fucker. Where’s Gordon Lee?”
She left them in the cellar manacled to each other and then chained to the wall by Hernandez’s bad leg. She left the door to the cellar steps open. She wanted someone to find them when they didn’t report in and didn’t want their deaths on her conscience. There was enough guilt there already.
The streets were empty and lined by long shadows. It couldn’t have been long after dawn. She decided to explore the city along the roofs of the row houses that formed the blocks near the Khans’ home. As a kid she and her schoolmates had jumped with ease across the alleyways separating these blocks. If she was lucky and quiet, she could make it all the way to Lee’s house three blocks over without ever coming down to street level.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Novices were being put through their early-morning paces by their drill instructors. This month’s farm-shift teams were shuffling off to the barns to make repairs. A crew was working on one of Lee’s
newfangled gas lamps, another on replacing a fractured wooden sewer pipe. But something seemed wrong. After a moment she got it: no older people, not a single Remnant. And even a lot of Firsters were absent. Just people her own age and those a bit older and children.
What had he done with all of them?
Keeping low along the roofs, she made her way down to Lee’s block. She jumped the alleyway and landed on the opposite roof almost noiselessly. One roof over from her destination. She crouched and scanned the immediate area. No guards.
Big head honcho now and no guards. Maybe that little Hernandez was lying. Maybe Lee lives somewhere else now.
Noises from below dropped Kendra to her belly. She crawled on elbows and knees to peer over the parapet. There were Gordon and Sofie Lee’s three girls marching off to school, giggling and poking one another and playing as young girls do, careless and stupid. And then before and behind them—bingo—a quartet of guards.
She could hear Sofie’s voice under her, sending reminders and farewells up the block while the girls yelled back promises of obedience and declarations of affection. Kendra couldn’t see her, but it made sense that Sofie was probably standing at the front door. She couldn’t hear anyone else after the girls left, not Lee, not any guards. Kendra waited for a few minutes on the roof flat on her back. A bright-blue sky was dawning almost completely devoid of clouds.
A good omen.
Kendra checked to see if the carbine was loaded and then the sidearm in her belt. She had been in the Lees’ home a few times, not many. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize it. The layout was like all of the other row houses built in this vicinity. But the furniture and all that stuff that goes along with three young girls—those were serious variables. All she needed was to slip on a misplaced wooden duck on wheels. Even with those distractions, she was sure she could get the drop on at least three guards—if any were still inside—if she needed to. And maybe even on Sofie, good as she had been back in the day. Weiss hadn’t lied when he said his niece had been one of the best soldiers he had ever trained.
The Beachhead Page 22