World After

9

IT’S NOT long before the streets are quiet. There weren’t many surviving scorpions to begin with but now, I’m willing to bet there are none.

Masculine bodies burst out of the pit and disappear into the cloud cover. One of them carries a limp angel, the only one I’ve seen who looks dead.

Somewhere, far away, thunder rumbles. The wind whistles through the corridor of buildings.

We wait until it seems safe to get up and take a closer look. I’d be shocked if there’s even a skin sample of the angels that we could bring back.

We approach the rubble, staying hidden as much as possible even though the coast seems clear.

We’re a stone’s throw away from the smoking wreckage when a boulder of concrete clanks down the side of the rubble pile. I freeze, eyes and ears alert.

Another piece falls and rolls into a tiny landslide.

Something is coming up from the rubble basement. We all take cover behind cars, watching carefully.

More rock-sized debris falls and it’s some time before hands reach up to the top of the rubble. A head emerges. At first, I think it’s some kind of demon that tunneled out from hell. But then, the creature pulls the rest of itself up, trembling and wheezing the entire time.

It’s an old woman.

But I’ve never seen anything like her. She’s shriveled, frail, and bony. Most striking of all, her skin is so dry it looks like beef jerky.

Dee-Dum and I look at each other, both wondering what she’s doing in there. She climbs up onto the peak and begins a shaky trek along the debris pile, moving as if she has arthritis.

She wears a tattered lab coat that’s five sizes too big for her. It’s so stained with dirt and rust-colored blotches that it’s hard to believe it was ever white. She holds it closed as she gingerly steps across the rubble, looking as if she’s holding herself together.

The wind blows her hair in her face and she tosses her head to get it out of the way. There’s something odd about both her full hair and that gesture. It takes me a minute to figure out what it is.

When was the last time I saw an old woman toss her head to get her hair away from her face? And her hair is dark all the way to her scalp even though the latest post-apocalyptic fashion for older women is at least an inch of gray roots.

She freezes like a frightened animal and looks up at us as we emerge from behind the cars. Even with her dried-up face, there’s something familiar about her that’s nagging me.

Then a memory tickles my mind.

An image of two little kids hanging onto the fence, watching their mom walk toward the aerie. Their mom turning around to blow a goodbye kiss.

She ended up as dinner in the fetus tank of one of the scorpion angels. I broke her tank with my sword and left her there to fend for herself because I couldn’t drag her out.

She’s alive.

Only, she looks like she has aged fifty years. Her once beautiful eyes have sunk into her face. Her cheeks are so lean I can almost see the skeleton beneath them. Her hands are talons covered in thin skin.

She scrambles away in abject terror as she sees us getting up from our hiding places. She’s almost on all fours as she runs off, and my heart breaks to remember her health and beauty before the monsters got to her. She can’t get very far in her condition, and she hides, trembling, behind a post-office box.

She’s a tiny slip of a thing, but she’s a survivor and I have to respect that. She deserves to get away from the place where she was buried alive, and she’ll need energy for that. I dig through my pockets and feel the Snickers bar. I root around to see if there’s something less valuable but find nothing.

I take a few steps toward the poor thing as she cringes in her hiding place.

My sister has more experience with this kind of thing than I do. But I guess I’ve learned a thing or two from watching Paige befriend all those abandoned cats and damaged kids. I put the candy bar on the road where the lady can see it, then take a few steps back to give her some safe space.

There’s a moment when the woman watches me like a beaten animal. Then she snatches the candy bar faster than I would have given her credit for. She tears off the wrapper in a split second and stuffs the candy in her mouth. Her strained face relaxes as she tastes the nutty, sweet flavor from the World Before.

“My kids, my husband,” she says in a hoarse voice. “Where did everybody go?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But a lot of people ended up at the Resistance camp. They might be there.”

“What Resistance camp?”

“It’s the Resistance who attacked the angels. People are gathering to join them.”

She blinks at me. “I remember you. You died.”

“Neither of us died,” I say.

“I did,” she says. “And I went to hell.” She wraps her thin arms around herself again.

I don’t know what to say. What difference does it make if she actually died or not? She certainly lived through hell and she looks it.

Sanjay walks up to us like he’s approaching a stray cat. “What’s your name?”

She glances at me for reassurance. I nod.

“Clara.”

“I’m Sanjay. What happened to you?”

She looks at her jerkied hand. “I got sucked dry by a monster.”

“What monster?” Sanjay asks.

“The scorpion angels I told you about,” I say.

“The hell doctor said I could go free if I led him to my little girls,” she says with her parched voice. “But I wouldn’t give them up. He said the monster would liquefy my insides and drink them. Said the mature ones wouldn’t go all the way and kill if they could help it, but the developing ones would.”

Clara starts shaking. “He said it would be the most excruciating thing I could imagine.” She shuts her eyes as if trying to keep tears back. “Thank God I didn’t believe him.” Her voice sounds choked. “Thank God I didn’t know any better.” She starts crying in dry heaves as if all the fluid actually was sucked out of her.

“You didn’t give up your children and you’re alive,” I say. “That’s all that matters.”

She puts her trembling hand on my arm, then turns to Sanjay. “The monster was killing me. And out of nowhere, she came and rescued me.”

Sanjay looks at me with new respect. I worry about her telling him about Raffe, but it turns out she passed out in the basement as soon as she saw me get stung by a scorpion, so she doesn’t remember much.

Clara’s plight eats away at me like acid as we pick through the debris. Sanjay sits on the sidewalk beside her, talking gently with her and taking notes. Comforting someone like her is the kind of thing my sister would have done in the World Before.

We find a couple of crushed scorpions, but we find nothing of the angels themselves. Not a drop of blood or a scrape of skin that might help us learn something about them.

“One little nuke,” says Dum, picking through the rubble. “That’s all I ask. I’m not greedy.”

“Yeah, that and the detonation keys,” says Dee, kicking over a boulder of concrete. He sounds disgusted. “Seriously, did they really have to hide the nukes from the rest of us? It’s not like we would have played with it like a toy and blown up a pasture full of cows or something.”

“Oh, man,” says Dum. “That would have been so awesome. Can you imagine? Boom!” He mimes a mushroom cloud. “Moo!”

Dee gives him a long-suffering look. “You are such a child. You can’t just waste a nuke like that. You gotta figure out a way to control the trajectory so that when the bomb goes off, it shoots the radioactive cows into your enemies.”

“Right on,” says Dum. “Squash some, infect the others.”

“Of course, you have to put the cows on ground zero’s perimeter, close enough so they’ll rocket out, but far enough away that they won’t turn into radioactive dust,” says Dee. “I’m sure, with a little practice, we could get the cows aimed just right.”

“I heard the Israelis nuked the angels. Blew them right out of the sky,” says Dum.

“That’s a lie,” says Dee. “No one would blow up their entire country in the hope that a few angels might be in the air when you did it. It’s just not responsible nuke behavior.”

“Unlike nuclear cow missiles,” says Dum.

“Exactly.”

“Besides,” says Dum. “They might turn into radioactive anti-superheroes for all we know. Maybe they’d just absorb the radioactivity and shoot it back at us.”

“They’re not superheroes, you idiot,” says Dee. “They’re just people who can, you know, fly. They’ll explode into smithereens just like anybody else.”

“Then how come there are no angel bodies here?” asks Dum. We stand in the middle of the debris, looking at the hole that goes down into what used to be the basement.

Broken human bodies lie scattered across the debris but none of them have wings.

The wind picks up, pelting us with cold drizzle.

“They couldn’t just have been injured, not with that many bullets and the building collapsing,” says one of the guys who came in another car. “Could they?”

We all look at each other, not wanting to say what we’re thinking.

“They took some bodies away,” says Dee.

“Yeah,” says Dum, “but they could just be unconscious for all we know.”

“There’s got to be a dead angel around here,” says Dee, lifting a concrete chunk and looking beneath it.

“Agreed. There has to be something.”

But there isn’t.