by Susan Ee
Without thinking, I sprint out into the night.
21
I pump my legs as fast as they’ll go. Screams shatter the air, interspersed by long gaps of silence. I imagine people holding their breath so they won’t be heard by the monsters. My skin breaks out in goose bumps at the thought of what might be happening.
My plan, if you can call it that, is to run like hell away from the school and find a vehicle with keys.
There ought to be plenty right in the parking lot. Obi and his men have been working hard to make sure all the cars have their keys in the ignition and are fully gassed up for emergencies like this one. Well, maybe they didn’t predict a situation just like this, but close enough.
Once in a car, I plan to honk that horn like nobody’s business and drive as far away as I can. Hopefully, the hellions will follow me.
I have no idea what I’ll do if they don’t. Or if I get caught on the way to the car. Or how to escape once they’re swarming around me. But that’s too much to think about in this panic.
And what about Paige and Mom and Raffe?
I shake my head. Focus.
A man starts screaming to my left.
If I keep running, the man will probably die. If I stop to help him, I’ll lose my chance to draw hellions away from everyone else. No good choices left in the World After.
I hesitate but keep on racing into the parking lot. Pooky Bear bumps against my leg on her straps, as though demanding to be part of the action. But I need to get to a car as soon as possible and start drawing the hellions my way.
I throw open the door to the nearest car. I can’t help but look behind me.
There are shadows already flying after me, getting closer with every heartbeat. Behind them, people are running every which way near the building.
I jump in the car and shut the door, hoping there’s a key. Hellions slam into my door and windshield.
Thank everything left that’s good in the world for Obi’s paranoia and preparation. The keys are there.
The little red Hyundai starts immediately. The engine roars to life.
I screech out of my parking spot, dislodging the creatures on my car. More pile on, though, as soon as I stop.
I honk the horn.
The hellions who hadn’t noticed me before stop chasing people to look my way. I’m tempted to run them over and smash their creepy bat faces under the tires.
But my job is to draw them away, not to waste time playing with them. I crack open the windows and scream, ‘Hey, you! Dinnertime! I’m over here, you scabby rats! Come and get me!’
The Hyundai is rocking with hellions as they pile on. I’m about to screech out of the lot – or at least make donuts until all the hellions head my way and leave the rest of the people alone – when I feel a thump. The car drops on one side. Then I see the shredded rubber of a tire being flung over the hood.
That was the front tire.
I stare dumbly at the ripped-up tire as it flops and wobbles to a standstill in the parking lot.
Then so many hellions pile onto my car that I can’t see the tire anymore.
I stroke the fur of my teddy bear. It’s all I can think to do.
Pooky Bear can’t help me in a vehicle. Not a lot of room to slice and dice.
That means I need to exit the car if I want a chance at getting out of this.
I sit in the car.
I wonder how long a person can stay in a vehicle.
But then, of course, the hellions begin pounding on the windshield.
Their bat faces and needle-sharp teeth scrape against the windows. How much force can a windshield take?
If they pound their way in, I’ll be in close quarters and won’t be able to use my sword or run. If I open the door, they’ll be on me before I can get my foot on the ground.
One of the hellions hops onto the hood, shoving the others aside. It’s one of the beefy ones who followed me from the Pit.
He’s carrying a rock.
He heaves the rock above his ugly head and smashes it against the windshield. The glass cracks into a million lines webbing across my vision. I take a deep breath as he lifts his rock again. I put my hand on the door handle and get ready to sprint my way out of here.
As the rock smashes down on the windshield again, I slam my door open as hard as I can.
All the hellions’ attention was on the rock, and I catch them by surprise. I manage to smack several creatures out of the way with my door. That gives me a sliver of room to run.
As soon as I get my foot on the asphalt, claws grab me. All teeth and spittle, it’s the side of hellions I haven’t seen in my sword dreams. They run from Raffe. With him, they are the victims. With me, they are the killers.
A hellion’s teeth scrape my cheek. Hands grab my arm and then claw at my chest. I hear myself screaming.
I grab its chin, shoving the head and mouth as far back as I can. For such a skinny little thing, it’s extremely strong. I’m twisted as far away from it as I can be while trying to snap its neck backward.
Its head is frantically moving back and forth, gnashing at me. It gets closer to my face, so close that I can smell its rotting-fish breath.
It gashes me with its claws, not even trying to save its own neck. It must be insane. I’m not going to win this battle.
My back is to the car. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see two others climbing past the door to get at me. I frantically look at one, then the other. No gun, I can’t draw my sword, and I’m trapped in the wedge of the car door.
The best I can hope for is that people get a few minutes to run while the hellions are busy tearing me apart. It’s a Penryn party.
Suddenly, they all stop.
Their bat-like faces lift into the air, their ugly nostrils sniffing madly. One of them shakes its head like a dog shaking off water.
The one that was about to reach my neck with its claws backs off, letting me go. The ones climbing over the door can’t back off fast enough. All around me, I sense terror.
They all run away.
It takes me a second to realize that I’m free and still alive.
In the headlight beams, a pair of legs walk toward the rush of hellions who are running from the car. The beam of light creeps up the person’s body as the legs move toward me until I can see who it is.
It’s my mother.
The hellions run. Away from the school, away from the people, and especially away from my mother.
‘What the hell?’ I stare, dumbfounded.
Then the smell finally hits my awareness. It reeks here. The windshield is splattered with Mom’s rotten eggs. Old yellow-and-black goo oozes across the windshield like a giant bird dropping.
The smell.
They’re running from the smell. They’re running with the same terror that the hellions did from the demon in the Pit when he hissed at them. Does the smell remind them of their evil bosses? Do they assume an angry demon lord is coming when they smell rotten eggs?
I stare at my mother as she walks toward me with eggs in each hand.
She may be insane, but she has seen and experienced things. Things that other people haven’t understood.
By the time she reaches me, the hellions have all run off.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
I nod. ‘How’d you do that?’
‘It does stink something awful, doesn’t it?’ My mom wrinkles her nose at me.
I stare at her, speechless, before I let out a weak laugh.
22
I walk into the grove with my mother. Another woman follows us a few steps behind.
I turn to her and say, ‘Hello.’
She bows her head slightly. She looks about the same age as my mom and wears a midlength coat with a hood that covers her head. Beneath the coat, a dress falls to her ankles and drapes over her slippers. There’s something familiar about her dress, but the thought flitters through my mind and gets pushed out by bigger things.
‘She’s with me,’ says my mom. I’m
not sure what to make of her. My mother usually doesn’t have friends, but it’s a whole new world, and maybe I don’t know as much about my mom as I thought.
The grove is quiet except for the crunching of our feet and the sound of someone running toward us. I look back and see Raffe fast approaching on foot. He’s almost invisible with his dark trench coat and cap. He must have come running when he heard me scream during the hellion attack.
Both my mother and her friend freeze when they see his figure, but I put out my hand and nod to show that he’s with me. They continue into the grove while I drop back to wait for Raffe.
My mom looks back to keep an eye on us and doesn’t even try to be polite about it. She’s fully vigilant, scanning the shadows. Good for her.
‘You all right?’ His voice is soft, almost apologetic. I wonder if he thought that it would be better for me if the hellions didn’t see him fighting for me. There were too many for him to kill them all, so a lot of them would have escaped and told other hellions. Or maybe he couldn’t afford to have Obi and the others see him fighting full force.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Those ugly bullies were more afraid of my mommy than any warrior angel anyway. She’s far more scary.’
He nods, looking preoccupied and troubled.
‘What did Obi show you?’
‘He gave me a tour of the camp.’
‘He showed you the ramen supplies?’
‘He showed me their weapons stock. Their evacuation plan. Their surveillance system.’
I almost trip over a branch. ‘Why would he do that?’ The question comes out more forcefully than I intended. Alarm bells are going off in my head. ‘He was Mr. Paranoid the last time he saw you.’
‘He wants to recruit me by impressing me. And he’s more desperate for fighters this time. He can sense I have military experience.’
‘So are you joining the Resistance?’
‘Not likely. I saw their dissection tables.’
‘What dissection tables?’
‘Where they dissect anything that isn’t strictly human. They have a prime table reserved in case they ever catch an angel.’
‘Oh.’
I want to remind him that we’re at war with an enemy we don’t understand. But it’s pointless to argue. I’ll never be okay with Uriel’s experiments on humans regardless of what reasons he thinks he has, so why would Raffe understand any reason we might have to cut into his kind?
‘They’re also working on an angel plague that they hope will wipe out my entire species.’
‘Really?’
‘They raided the lab on Angel Island when they rescued their people and stole something they could tinker with. Apparently, Laylah is working on a human plague and generating various strains to optimize the damage. There’s one strain that they hope might work against angels.’
‘How close are they to creating this angelic plague?’
‘Not very. Otherwise, I would have had to kill them.’
We walk in silence, the concept of kill or be killed heavy between us.
I’m relieved when we reach Paige, if only to interrupt the silence.
My sister is sitting beside her locusts. My mother and her friend stop at a respectful distance and stare at the beasts.
Paige gets up, sending the locusts flying to the branches above, and runs to Mom. Paige is the baby of the family, and she has a different relationship with our mother than I do. Mom strokes her hair while Paige snuggles into her hug.
‘How did it go with Doc?’ Raffe whispers.
I take a deep breath and give him the bad news about Doc’s broken arm. He doesn’t say anything, but I know the news hits him hard. His amputated wings are withering every second they’re not on him, and I’m pretty sure they won’t last as long as they did last time. And now, the only doctor who can reattach them won’t be back in action for six weeks.
And then there’s my starving sister . . .
I feel drained. There must be another answer, but I’m too emotionally beat up to think. I just want to crawl into the vault in my head and close the door on the world.
I lean toward Raffe and feel his muscles against my arm. I close my eyes and relax into him. He feels so solid. I’m not sure if I’m giving him comfort or the other way around.
When I open my eyes, my mom’s friend is watching us. I quickly step away from Raffe and stand tall. It’s a strange thing for her to do – watching us instead of the locusts or the cut-up little girl.
‘Somebody is looking for you,’ she says.
Oh, right. ‘Yeah, I heard.’ The angels, the hellions – who doesn’t want a piece of me right now?
She nods toward Raffe. ‘I meant him.’
Do they have a bounty on him too? He had a red mask over his face when we were fighting the angels, so they must have thought he was just some demon, right?
‘I have a message for you,’ says the woman to Raffe. ‘The message is, freedom and gratitude. Trust, my brother.’
Raffe spends a couple of seconds taking that in. ‘Where is he?’ he asks.
‘Waiting for you downtown at the church with the stained glass.’
‘He’s there now?’
‘Yes.’
He turns to me. ‘Do you know where that is?’
‘Sort of,’ I say, having a vague memory of a couple of different churches in Palo Alto. ‘What’s going on?’
He doesn’t say anything.
I wonder if the twins got their message wrong. Maybe the angels are looking for Raffe and not me.
‘Do you need anything more from me?’ the woman asks. She’s creeping me out a little with her calm and peaceful voice.
‘No, thank you.’ Raffe’s thoughts are far away.
The woman takes off her hood. Her head is shaved, looking particularly pale.
She takes off her coat, letting it fall to the ground. A sheet is wrapped around her body, tied at one shoulder. Her dark eyes look huge in her bald head, and they gaze at me with peace and serenity. Her hands are together with her fingers interlocking in front of her. The only thing that mars her old-world look is the pair of white tennis shoes she wears beneath her sheet.
She gives us a little bow before turning toward my sister. She doesn’t say any of the rehearsed recruiting statements that I would expect from someone so obviously part of an apocalypse cult. She just moves toward my sister quietly, then stops in front of her.
My mother bows to the lady. ‘Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for volunteering.’
‘Volunteering for what?’ I ask, feeling uneasy.
‘Don’t worry about it, Penryn.’ My mother waves me away. ‘I’ll take care of this.’
‘Take care of what?’ I’m not used to seeing my mom dealing with people, and I’m certainly not used to seeing her interacting with people the way she is with this woman. ‘Take care of what, Mom?’
My mother turns to me with exasperation, as if I’m embarrassing her. ‘I’ll explain it to you when you’re older.’
I stand under the trees and blink several times at her. It’s all I can think to do. ‘When I’m older? Seriously?’
‘This is not for you. I know you, Penryn. You don’t want to see this.’ She shoos me away.
I take a few steps back and join Raffe to watch in the shadows. My mother gestures for us to move farther back, and we turn and walk away. I slip behind a tree to watch when Mom stops looking at us. Raffe stands beside me but doesn’t bother to hide.
The cult woman bows her head and kneels humbly in front of Paige. A part of me wants to leave, never knowing what’s about to happen. But another part of me wants to barge in between them and break it up.
Something is going on with my mother’s full approval that definitely needs supervising. Are they trying to recruit Paige into a cult? I feel no guilt about spying right now. I’m normally big on privacy, but I just need to make sure that there’s nothing . . . well, crazy going on.
‘I am here to serve you, Great One,’ says
the woman.
‘It’s okay,’ says Mom to Paige. ‘She volunteered. We have a whole line of cult members who volunteered. They know how important you are. They’re willing to make sacrifices.’
I don’t like the word sacrifices. I rush over to them.
Paige sits on a fallen tree, looking down at the woman now kneeling in front of her. The woman loosens her sheet and tilts her head to the side to expose her vulnerable neck.
I stand frozen, taking in the scene. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Penryn, stay out of this,’ says Mom. ‘This is a private affair.’
‘Are you offering her as meat?’
‘This isn’t like the other time,’ says Mom. ‘She volunteered. This is an honor for her.’
The cult member looks at me awkwardly with her head still tilted to the side. ‘It’s true. I have been chosen. I am honored to nourish the Great One who has resurrected the dead and will lead us to heaven.’
‘Who wants to go to heaven anymore? There’s nothing but angels there.’ I look at her to see if she’s joking. ‘You actually volunteered to be eaten alive?’
‘My spirit will be renewed as my flesh nourishes the Great One.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ I look back and forth between my mother, who is nodding seriously, and the woman, who must be on drugs or something. ‘What makes you think she’s the Great One anyway? The last time we were here, this camp tried to draw and quarter her.’
‘The doctor from Alcatraz has told Obadiah and the council that she is the Great One, the chosen one who will be our savior. The rest of the camp doesn’t believe, but we of the New Dawn know that she must be the Great One meant to save us from this holy tragedy.’
‘She’s just a little girl.’ I want to say the word normal, but I can’t.
‘Please don’t stop this,’ says the woman, her eyes pleading. ‘Please don’t interfere. If you reject me, someone else will have the privilege, and I will be disgraced.’ Her eyes actually fill with tears. ‘Please allow my life to mean something in this world. This is the greatest contribution and the greatest honor I could have in this life.’
I stand there with my jaw slack, trying to think of something to say.
My baby sister, though, doesn’t have any problems turning her down. She shyly shakes her head no and crosses her legs, sitting in her monk pose. We’d always called her our little Buddha since she decided to be a vegetarian when she was only three.