Flying, page 32
part #5 of Girl With Broken Wings Series
My right knee throbs with pain, and I lay on the ground, panting, watching the sky vibrate above me, before I stumble up and limp toward the door. The bullet holes in the posts of the porch commemorate my last visit. I grip the knob to the front door and turn.
I don’t expect the door to be unlocked.
The door is unlocked.
I walk into a land of death. The first bodies lie just inside the parlor. Some have been placed caringly on couches, eyes closed, arms folded on their chests. These must have been the early ones. Other bodies lie in limp disconcert on the floor, some sprawled on their backs, others slumped against the walls. Sightless eyes peer out of gaunt faces. I see the engorged red veins running up their forearms, palms entirely crusted over with black scabs, and something new. Dried blood crusts the nostrils and ears, even the eyes, of some.
It was better that Lo didn’t tell me, because my heart quavers at the sight of those dried trails of blood. My knees threaten to buckle, but slowly I move forward, careful to avoid stepping on arms, fingers, and feet. An odd little thought pops into my head. This must be what it’s like to walk through a battlefield after the enemy has fled. No smell of cannon fire on the wind. No bullet holes in the bodies. But death is here.
We did this, I think. Yolanda said we were committing genocide, and she was right.
Then I realize that not everyone is dead. Moans rise from dry lips. Stiff limbs shudder. A few gazes slowly limp to me. Whether they ask for a rescue or hang on me simply because they are too tired to go anywhere else, I don’t know.
Horror crawls through me. Even through the fog of my own illness, I feel a different kind of sickness infecting me. Can you be poisoned by a sight? These dead and the soft, pained groans of those soon to follow – this is my glorious victory.
It was necessary, I remind myself, but necessity is a cruel, uncaring banner to fight under. Necessity will never make me feel good or right about this. Necessity has turned me into a monster and Rain and all the Totem members with me.
In the kitchen, an even more terrible scene greets me. I count six bodies, some lying in pools of dried blood, their palms sliced open. Only one angel is alive. She has short-cropped silver hair, and the stylish white business suit she wears must have carried four digits on its price tag when it was on the rack. Now that perfect white is marred by deep scarlet stains. She sits against the counter, industriously carving at the hardened, scabbed flesh of her left palm. Blood trickles down her arm, soaked into the lap of her skirt. She glances up at me and then back down.
So many angels in this house. They must have come together when the sickness started. Lo detonated his first canister somewhere nearby. Las Vegas was one of the very first major cities hit.
The stench of death leads me into the living room. At least 40 of them huddle together, all on their knees. The only way I can tell the living from the dead is by the slow movement of chapped lips. I hear snatches of whispered prayer. Some seem to be merely ranting.
My stomach lurches, and I want to turn, rush out the front door and leave death to his work, but then I spot the figure at the head of the group. War is on his knees like the rest, those thick hands clasped in a desperate embrace with each other. He looks up, but he doesn’t recognize me at first. His dark eyes are glassy with fever. The sickness has aged him, sapping the power from his shoulders and the arrogance from his bearing. Those shoulders are hunched now, his mouth buried in black stubble and turned in a grimace. No cruel smiles, not a speck of menace within him, not even when I see the light of recognition finally kindle in his eyes.
“Sister, have you come to pray with us?” His voice is barely a whisper.
I move through the bodies, pushing gently to make a path, and then I stand before him. I wait for the great anger to come bellowing out of me. Weak as I am, I know that I have more strength than him, plus a dagger in my boot that would slide easily enough into the side of his neck. But no anger comes, not for the torture in the tiny room in Pennsylvania, not for what he did to Raven, not even for hijacking faith and using it to maim and murder. Perhaps some part of me realizes that there is no point in hating a corpse.
So, I very slowly set myself down onto my aching kneecaps directly across from War.
“What are we praying for,” I ask.
He smiles at that, just a little. “Salvation.”
I look at him, at his mussed hair and wrinkled suit. He was always so flashy, so intent on presentation, that’s it’s a shock to see him undone.
“Do you really still believe?” I’m not trying to challenge him; I really am curious.
War sets his chin on his hands. I notice a drop of blood trembling from his left nostril. “Our last doc croaked yesterday. There is nothing left but belief. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what I believe. It’s what they need.”
He nods to the angels around us, to his followers, and the realization strikes me that he actually cares about them; that he takes his responsibility as their leader seriously. I thought this whole religion thing was all just a bold joke of his, but maybe it was something more complicated. Maybe the wolf came to love his duped flock.
I have to work hard to find my feet.
“Oh, do stay. At least one of us should get the pleasure of watching the other die,” War says. And there, I catch a flash of the familiar cruel smile. IT seems the illness has not entirely blunted his sharp edges. He adds, “I might hold on a little longer just to watch the light go out of your eyes.” A trickle of blood slips out of his nose, and with slow, painful precision, War tugs a stained kerchief from the pocket of his suit jacket and catches the blood.
I search for a glint of gold among the bowed heads, but Heather does not kneel within the crowd. I find her sitting halfway up the staircase, glassy eyes staring forward. Her body is so loose, slumped against the bannister, that I don’t realize she’s alive, until she blinks and focuses on me as I move toward her.
I stand at the foot of the steps. “Would you like a glass of water?” I ask.
She listlessly shakes her head. This tells me that she is in her final hours. The shadow of death has given her beauty a strange twist. Her skin is a bloodless white, and her blue eyes glitter almost feverishly. Her cheekbones are prominent on her thin face. Over the last days, the Prism has kept me fed, allowing my skin to absorb concentrated sunlight. These angels, with their palms crusted over and feeding bulbs trapped, have been slowly starving to death.
The irony isn’t lost on me, but I’m not laughing.
“Why is he angry with us? How did we fail him?” Heather’s breathy words pull me out of my thoughts. I see a glint of silver in her oozing palms. She fingers the sideways cross in her chapped, trembling fingers.
I sit down on the stair beneath her feet, and my mind is slow to generate a response. I remember how Heather prayed with me in what I thought were the last moments of my life; when she forgave me for an unforgivable act.
Can I forgive her too? For starving me almost to death? For the lives she’s taken in the name of a corrupted faith?
The answer is simple and easy. Yes.
She’s dying. War’s dying. I’m dying. There is no hate left in my heart. Only pity. I force my mind to focus and dig clumsily for the right words.
“You didn’t fail,” I say. “God is calling you back to his side.”
Heather’s head comes up. She seems to be thinking, or trying to think. I wonder if reality is becoming liquidy and bent for her as it did for me when I was starving. Certainly, my own mind is unbinding, thread by thread, with illness.
“But the humans,” she finally murmurs. “How can he allow the humans to live? The sons of Cain?”
I kind of ignore that last thing. “He didn’t,” I lie boldly, knowing she doesn’t have the strength to even turn on a television and flip to the news. “The plague has spread to the humans too. They are falling in the millions, all across the world. God is calling everyone back, but he took the angels first. They will enter his embrace before all others.” I try to make this sound poetic and inspired.
“Is it true?” She looks at me
“I am half human, half angel,” I tell her and peel back my gloves so she can see my crusted palms. Technically, this isn’t true. I am an angel, as Tarren has explained, but I simply express less genetic modifications than most others. It’s probably why I’ve lasted so long with The Cure. The fact that I am infected is also no evidence that the whole of humanity is dying away, but my palms seem to convince Heather. Her furrowed brow smooths, and the edge of a smile raises her lips. She was never very smart, not even when her brain wasn’t pulped by plague and hunger.
Her hand reaches out clumsily toward me. I remember how she held my hands during my cleansing, how much I loved her for her kindness even though I knew that she was the cause of my pain. That love comes bubbling back now, and I don’t even care how fucked up it is. I take her hand and rest my head on her knee.
We stay like that for a long, long time. I doze. When I wake, the light is low in the windows, throwing evening’s shadows across the group. Heather’s hand is cold and still in my own, and her head has fallen forward, shining hair loose around her face. I don’t know how I do it, but I pick her up and carry her down the stairs and through the group of angels. My legs tremble, and my arms burn even under such a light burden. War is still alive, but it won’t be long. Bloody tears have painted red trails down his face, and his eyelids are drooping. He rouses himself as I lay Heather next to him, the only open space left in the room.
His swollen hand pushes the hair off her face in a clumsy yet tender gesture. “Goodbye sister,” he whispers, and the ache of his voice would have been a sweet sound to me if I weren’t so tired.
War looks up at me. “No one will bury us,” he says. This may be poetic, or he could be rambling with fever. I don’t know. I don’t care. And I don’t need to watch the light go out of his eyes. I’ve seen enough. My legs don’t want to move, but I force them to turn, to carry me out of the living room and toward the front door.
I have somewhere else to die.
Chapter 47—Tarren
I hold Danielle’s hand in my lap and use one of her large nail files to carefully rub away the hard scab across her palm.
“You need to keep feeding,” I explain to her. “Your skin will absorb a fair quantity of the sunlight’s energy on its own, but you can intake much more through the feeding mechanisms in your palms.”
“Maybe I should just feed on you,” she says faintly. “We can die together. How do you like that, Romeo?”
I glance up. I can barely see her face through the bright stream of sunlight that the Prism pours across her body. The cloud of light makes her look almost like an ethereal being. I’ve set her in front of the mirrors since the sun came up. If I can just keep her alive long enough, it’s possible that her immune system may learn to manufacture antibodies to fight the Cure. It’s the only chance; the only thing I can think of.
“Human energy tastes sooo much better. Tarren, you have no idea.” She gives me her teasing little smile. She has complained about the Prism ever since I asked Lo to make a second unit two years ago, but I know she uses it exclusively. It was the promise I extracted from her after I threatened to end my visits. Could I have really done that? We didn’t have to find out.
I don’t respond to Danielle’s teasing, just cast my gaze back to her palm. My focus is divided between the gentle strokes of the nail file and in keeping my mind calm and detached. I won’t let her see my true doubts and worries through my aura.
I finish with her hand but keep it in my lap. The delicate veins in her wrist and forearm are beginning to swell with the infection, glowing an irritated pink beneath her skin. I know too well what’s happening inside her body. I saw it under the lens of the microscope when we took blood samples from our test subjects. The virus is slipping through the barrier of Danielle’s cells, attaching to her DNA and releasing proteins that eat away at that singular uniqueness that can only be found in the angel strand. Symptoms always express first in the hands where the most mutated cells exist, but the virus will travel with her blood throughout the rest of her body. By tomorrow it will be in all her major organs and in her brain. Her systems will begin to fail, one after another. Eventually, her heartbeat will become erratic. Her mind will slip into hallucinations. Blood will pour into her lungs.
“Other hand,” I say.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” She takes my hand, her raw, smooth palm, touching mine. This level of physical connection is probably still difficult for her, even within the nourishing beam of the Prism. I am very careful before I answer, pushing my emotions far, far away so she won’t hear anything in my voice.
“Maybe, but this will help.”
“And you did this,” she says.
“I helped create it.” I’d explained everything last night. “I didn’t release it. I…would have found somewhere…I would have kept you safe if I had known.” And even though it’s true, it’s no excuse. I should have considered the possibility that Lo would forsake the added layers of testing, review, and precaution I mandated. I should have remembered his youth and his anger.
I keep Danielle in front of the mirrors absorbing as much energy as she can throughout the day. The illness takes its toll by the hour. The veins in her arms swell, and her skin grows hot with fever as her immune system floods her body with white blood cells looking for the virus. If I can keep her alive for four or five days they might have enough time to adapt, to fight.
That night, I sit in a chair by her bed and watch her small body shiver beneath the blankets. Throughout the world, thousands of angels are shivering too. If the Cure works as we intended, the secret war is ending right now.
Shouldn’t I feel a weight lifting from my shoulders?
Danielle turns to face me. The lamplight shadows her eyes. She won’t say it, but I know that she is scared. I have brought this suffering to her.
“Do you want water?” I ask gently.
She shakes her head. Her hair is tangled and wavy over the pillow. She looks younger without makeup. I think of all the slinky dresses, all the high heels and tight pants that fill her closet. The jewelry spilling out of the box on her nightstand and all the other trinkets she uses to make herself look desirable and intimidating. Now, without the jewelry and heels and the tart glint in her eyes, she looks beautiful.
I make a decision.
It starts with standing up from the chair, but then I pause. I don’t know how to do the next part, not in front of another person. Not even in front of myself. I always try to avoid mirrors.
I decide to begin with my shoes. I unlace them, pull them off, and line them up against the bed. The socks seem like a reasonable next step. I lay each one over its shoe. I hesitate then. Shirt or pants? I choose pants. My legs have fewer scars than my chest and back.
Danielle watches, her brown eyes moving to follow the motion of my limbs. I know she can see everything, every line that Grand cut into me, every reminder of the price I paid for being the one who survived.
I fold my jeans and place them on top of the socks and shoes. My hands feel clumsy and sweaty. I know what comes next. I roll my long-sleeved shirt up and over my head. I try to stay calm, to breathe slowly as I begin to fold my shirt.
“No, just drop it,” Danielle says, her voice rough.
I let the shirt fall from my hands. I reach for the tight black boxers on my hips.
“Not yet. Just stand there, let me see you.” She lifts herself up onto her elbow.
I look straight ahead out the dark window at the painted black sky. The sky is always black, I remind myself. It’s only our atmosphere that turns it blue in the daylight.
“Come to me,” Danielle says.
I walk over to the bed, lower myself next to her, and press a hard, hungry kiss on her fevered lips.
She turns her head away and puts a finger on my lips. “Soft,” she says. “Give me a soft, long kiss.”
I hesitate.
“Like you love me. Like this.” She throws the covers back, slings a leg around my hips, and leans in. Her lips press against mine, not exactly soft, but not rough either. She opens her mouth over mine, and her tongue moves in to explore. It’s such a different feeling, this lingering contact that is not about dominance. Her hand strokes my arm gently. I tense, expecting the cut of her nails, but the pads of her fingers are smooth and gentle.
Without the sharp pricks of pain from her nails, from her teeth, from her bruising kisses, I feel new things, the heat and press of her thighs wrapped around my torso, the long stroll of her tongue down my jaw.
“Slow, slow,” she whispers. I take her nipple in my mouth over her thin chemise, but I don’t bite. I suck, and my hands move under the silky fabric. She gasps with pleasure and arches her back, and the feel of her hips pressing into mine sparks waves of heat through me. Her hands travel down my chest, and I pause, knowing all the ridges of scarred flesh she must feel beneath her fingertips.
“Don’t stop,” she chides softly.
I carefully tug the chemise over her head, watching her hair spill down her large breasts. It’s the first piece of clothing I haven’t torn off her body. Eventually, she slips her thumbs under the waist of my boxers, rolling them down until I kick them off. All the other times I would have been done with her by now. A few quick thrusts after we’d accumulated enough bruises. But tonight, I wait and wait, until we are both straining, and then I enter her. We move together, first me over her, pressing her into the bed, and then, later, she takes control, sucking the sides of my neck and my jaw as she rides on top of me.
When it is over, she lays panting, draped across my chest. Her skin is almost fiery to the touch, but she smiles at me with languid pleasure.
I never knew it could be like this, especially between us.
“Don’t leave tonight,” she says.
I don’t say anything, but gently wrap my hands around her and shift her into my side. I know the risks of her losing control, but I hardly care.
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