54
I get into an SUV big enough to have two backseats. I slide into the back and notice the soft leather, the tinted windows, the first-class stereo. Things we took for granted that we’ll never have again.
Paige is flying in the arms of one of her three locusts, while Mom is riding on a bus with a bunch of cult members who swear they had nothing to do with my kidnapping. I don’t know what to make of them, but if I were going to worry about the safety of anyone on that bus, it’d be them, not my mom.
My recorded announcement tells people that we have a plan. But we don’t, not really. All we know is that some of us will distract the angels at the Bay Bridge while everyone else crosses the channel spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge.
I squeeze into the backseat with the last remaining members of the old council that Obi was putting together. One is a woman who managed global distribution for Apple, and the other is an ex-military guy who calls himself the Colonel.
The Colonel keeps throwing suspicious glances at me. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t believe a word of the wild stories going around about me. And even if any of it is true, he still thinks I’m a ‘mass hallucination preying on the desperate hopes of the people.’
But he’s here to help as best he can, and that’s all I can ask for. I just wish he’d stop giving me those looks that remind me that he could be right.
Doc and Sanjay slide into the seats behind us. It’s not surprising that the two of them get along since they’re both researchers. Sanjay seems to have no worries about being seen with Doc.
The two council members objected to Doc being here, but no one else has Doc’s knowledge of angels and monsters. Doc’s bruises look just as bad as the last time I saw him, but there are no fresh ones. People are too busy surviving to mess with him right now.
The twins slide into the driver’s and passenger’s seat in front of us. They have newly dyed blue hair. It’s not entirely blue but streaked and splotched over their blond as if they didn’t have enough time to do it right.
‘What’s up with your hair?’ I ask. ‘Aren’t you worried you’ll be spotted by angels flying above with all that blue?’
‘War paint,’ says Dee, fastening his seatbelt.
‘Except it’s in our hair instead of on our faces,’ says Dum, starting the engine. ‘Because we’re original like that.’
‘Besides, are poisonous frogs worried about being spotted by birds?’ asks Dee. ‘Are poisonous snakes? They all have bright markings.’
‘You’re a poisonous frog now?’ I ask.
‘Ribbit.’ He turns and flicks out his tongue at me. It’s blue.
My eyes widen. ‘You dyed your tongue too?’
Dee smiles. ‘Nah. It’s just Gatorade.’ He lifts up a bottle half-full of blue liquid. ‘Gotcha.’ He winks.
‘“Hydrate or Die,” man,’ says Dum as we turn onto El Camino Real.
‘That’s not Gatorade’s marketing,’ says Dee. ‘It’s for some other brand.’
‘Never thought I’d say this,’ says Dum, ‘but I actually miss ads. You know, like “Just Do It.” I never realized how much of life’s good advice came from ads. What we really need now is for some industrious soul to put out a product and give us a really excellent saying to go with it. Like “Kill ’Em All and Let God Sort ’Em Out.”’
‘That’s not an advertising jingle,’ I say.
‘Only because it wasn’t good advice back in the day,’ says Dum. ‘Might be good advice now. Attach a product to it, and we could get rich.’ He turns and arches a brow at his brother, who turns and arches an identical eyebrow back.
‘So does anyone have a good survival strategy, or is there no hope for getting out of this nightmare?’ asks the Colonel.
‘We came up with a big, fat zero. I don’t know how we’re going to survive the blood hunt,’ says Dee.
‘That wasn’t the nightmare I was referring to,’ says the Colonel. ‘Death by stupid comments is what I was talking about.’
The twins look at each other and make an O with their mouths like little boys telling each other they’ve been busted.
I grin in spite of it all. It’s good to know I can still smile, if only a little.
Then we get down to business.
‘What’s going on with that angel plague you were working on, Doc? Any chance we could go pandemic on their asses?’ asks Dee.
He shakes his head. ‘It’ll take at least a year, assuming that we could get it to work. We don’t know anything about their physiology and don’t have anyone to test it on. But if we’re lucky, it’ll take a few of them out soon anyway.’
‘How?’ asks the Colonel.
‘The angels were creating another beast for the apocalypse,’ says Doc. ‘The instructions were very specific. It had to have seven heads that were a mix of animals.’
‘The sixer?’ I ask. ‘Yeah, I saw it.’
‘If it has seven heads, why do you call it a sixer?’ asks Sanjay.
‘It has the number six-six-six tattooed on its foreheads.’
Dum looks at me with a horrified expression.
‘The angels called it the beast,’ says Doc. ‘But I like your sixers name better.’
‘The seventh head was human, and it was dead,’ I say.
‘Was the sixer alive?’ asks Doc. ‘Did any of the angels around it look sick?’
‘Oh, it was definitely alive. I didn’t notice anybody looking sick. But then again, I wasn’t looking at them. Why?’
‘We had three of them.’
‘There are three of those things?’
‘All variations of each other. With that many animals mixed together in one body, things are bound to go wrong. At the same time they were making them, Laylah, the lead physician, was working on an apocalyptic plague. It was supposed to be for us humans, but there was a lot of experimentation to make it as gruesome as possible. Somehow, one of the strains got passed on to the sixers.’
I remember Uriel talking to Laylah in his suite before the last aerie party. He was pressuring her pretty hard to cut corners and make the apocalypse happen faster. I’m guessing she’s been cutting corners all along to meet his demands.
‘The sixers infected the angel doctors. They got sick, then about a day or two later, they were exposed to the sixers again, and that massively accelerated the disease. They bled out in the most horrible way. It looked excruciatingly painful too. It was everything they were trying to do with a human disease, only it killed angels and locusts instead. The human lab workers were fine, and so were the sixers. They were just carriers of the disease.’
‘Do you have one in a cage somewhere?’ I ask.
‘The infected sixers were all killed. I was ordered to dispose of the bodies. Angels don’t do dirty work like that. Before I burned them, though, I managed to sneak two vials of their blood. I used one to infect the new batch of sixers that they created. I was hoping it might cause some random damage.’
‘Did it?’ I ask, thinking about Raffe even now.
‘I don’t know. After the accident, they separated the projects to avoid further contamination, so I lost track of it.’
‘What did you do with the second vial of blood?’
‘I kept it for study. That’s what we’ve been using to try to come up with an angel plague.’
‘But no luck?’ I ask.
‘Not yet,’ says Doc. ‘Not for a long time to come.’
‘Time we don’t have,’ says the Colonel. ‘Next idea.’
Our goal is easy to identify – we need to come up with a way to survive the onslaught tonight. But we just talk in circles, trying to figure out how to do it. For all we know, we could be the only freedom fighters showing up at the Bay Bridge.
As we drive up the peninsula, we talk.
And talk.
And talk some more.
I’m trying not to yawn, but it’s not easy. It feels like it’s been a week since I slept.
‘The angels might not even know which bridge is the East Bay Bridge,’ says the Colonel. ‘We need a lure or something that will attract them away from the Golden Gate.’
‘What kind of a lure?’ asks Dee.
‘Should we dangle little babies from the bridge?’ asks Dum.
‘Sadly, that’s not funny,’ says Doc.
I rub my forehead. I’m usually not prone to headaches, but all this desperate talk of coming up with a plan is killing me. I’m not really the planning type.
My eyes drift to the window, and I become mesmerized by the drone of the adult voices in the car and my own sleepiness.
We’re driving along the bay as we head north to San Francisco. The water sparkles like a field of diamonds waiting to be picked if only you could reach in with magic hands and grab them.
The wind picks up, floating leaves and trash by the side of the road. I don’t remember seeing trash by the freeway in the World Before, but a lot has changed since then.
My eyes lazily follow a piece of paper as it flitters across the road. It dances in the breeze, floating up and down, then pirouetting on the wind. It lands in the water, causing a ripple of sparkles around it.
In my half-dreaming state, it looks like one of the twins’ talent show flyers.
‘Come one, come all to the greatest show of all.’ Isn’t that what the flyer says?
I can see the twins standing on an apple crate, wearing striped suits and hats like barkers at a carnival. They’re calling to the ragged refugees. ‘Step right up, folks. This will be the biggest fireworks show in history. There’ll be bangs, there’ll be screams, there’ll be popcorn! This is your last chance – your last chance to show off your amazing talents.’
Then it all comes together.
I sit up, as wide awake as if I’d been zapped by my mother’s cattle prod. I blink twice, tuning back in to the conversation. Sanjay is saying something about wishing he knew more about the angels’ physiology.
‘The talent show.’ I look at the twins with wide eyes. ‘Who could resist a talent show?’
Everyone looks at me as if I’m nuts. That puts a slow grin on my face.