Kill All Angels E-Book

Robert Brockway

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The concluding volume in the punk-rock fantasy epic that began with THE UNNOTICEABLES and THE EMPTY ONES. Carey and Randall get to LA's Chinatown in the early 1980s just as the punk scene is starting there. But it's not all cheap guitars and back-alley bars: the Empty Ones have set up shop in LA, too. A deceptively young, shockingly brutal Chinese girl with silver hair runs things here, watched by a former lover, Zang, who might be the best ally Carey and Randall have ever had . . . if he doesn't eat the both of them first. Kaitlyn is also back in LA, with powers she barely understands, and something you might call a plan, if you were feeling particularly generous: if she can find one specific angel here and kill it, she might just set off a chain reaction that will bring all the angels down, for good.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Robert Brockway

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Kill All Angels

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

KILL ALL ANGELS

Also by Robert Brockway

Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News

(from the editors of Cracked.com)

Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

The Unnoticeables

The Empty Ones

Kill All Angels

Kill All Angels

Print edition ISBN: 9781783298013

E-book edition ISBN: 9781783298020

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: December 2017

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Robert Brockway asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2017 by Robert Brockway. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is dedicated to you, the reader. I spent years digging this shaky tunnel down into the most diseased and horrible pits of my soul, then asked you to come visit. You said, “yes.” That was very stupid, and you’ll almost certainly die down here, but thank you.

ONE

Carey. 1984. Los Angeles, California. Chinatown.

Ever heard the noise fingernails make when they’re digging into steel? No? Oh, well, when you’re on the other side of it—the screeching muffled but somehow also amplified by all that metal between you—it’s almost pretty. Sounds like whales singing.

“We ain’t got much time before those things get through that door,” I said, wrapping my belt around the interior hinge and cinching it tight. It wasn’t a great barricade, but it would hold for a few minutes. “And you’ve seen what they’ll do to us when that happens, so listen close, I’m only going to explain this once. No questions. None of that ‘oh no, that’s crazy, I don’t believe it’ garbage. After the shit you’ve seen in the last ten minutes, you lost the right to be skeptical.”

The kid’s eyes were the size of hubcaps. Couldn’t do much more than nod.

“Let me start from the top. There are angels—you haven’t seen those yet—but they look like little stars, just burning in the air right in front of you. They make a sound like the ocean in a storm, if a thousand people were drowning in it. They do something to people. They treat us like a math problem. They pick out all our little quirks and problems, every redundant or unnecessary bit, and they solve us. Usually when that happens, there’s a boom and a shudder and the person is just gone. No idea what happens to them.”

The door shook with a sound like a garbage truck hitting a telephone pole. The kid shivered. I went on.

“But sometimes a solve doesn’t go quite right, and the person doesn’t disappear. There’s something left over, like a remainder to that math problem. When that happens, the person pukes up a bunch of black shit that takes on a life of its own—that’s what those tar men that burned your friends to a crisp are. And the shell of the human being left over becomes this unkillable pyscho—that’s what the Chinese girl with the silver hair is, and that’s why she ate part of your girlfriend back at Madame Wong’s.”

The kid clearly wanted to cry, but was trying not to for my benefit.

“Oh, also the Empty Ones—that’s what we call those shells—do something to people, too. They take away bits of their humanity, until all that’s left are those faceless punks out there calling for your blood. There’s your rundown. You cool?”

“Y-yeah,” the kid said. “Super cool.”

There has never, in history, been a person less cool.

He was a little guy. 120 pounds and 5’4” on a good day. None of that muscle. He had the build of a man who survives solely on government cheese and instant noodles. There was a streak of light blue through his spiked blond hair, and he had some wispy facial fuzz that would require a second puberty to qualify as a mustache. He was wearing skintight blue jeans, fashionably torn, of course, and a faded T-shirt for a band called Red Wedding. Never heard of them. Made a mental note to check them out afterward, in his honor.

“All right,” I said, and clapped the kid on the shoulder reassuringly. “So here’s the plan: when I say go, you’re gonna take this broom and run out the door swinging.”

“What? Like hell!” The kid tried to cringe back from me, but there wasn’t much room in the walk-in freezer. He just kind of cowered around the frozen peas.

“Listen, kid, remember earlier? When I said ‘you know what they’re gonna do to us?’ I didn’t mean you. They’re not gonna do a damn thing to you. They don’t care about you. You’re an object. You’re not even an obstacle. The only thing they want is me. The only reason your friends died—and I am so sorry to say this—is because they were in the way. They were in between those things, and me. I’m what they want, and what I’m really doing here is asking you for a favor. I need you. I need you to save my life.”

“Save you? How?”

“You go out that door swinging, and maybe it throws them off their game for just a few seconds. A few seconds for me to run. They’ll all chase after me, but they won’t spare you a second glance. Those few seconds are all you can buy me, but it’s better than nothing. I’m hurt, and I was never all that fast to start with, so I probably won’t make it far, but I’ve gotta try. Please, kid. Just a few seconds of broom swinging and maybe some yelling, if you’re feeling up to it. That’s all I’m asking from you, and then you turn around and you run like hell and forget about all this. Except for the part where you’re a hero. My hero.”

“They’ll kill me, they’ll—”

“They wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. You’re a gnat. You’re not even something worth swatting away. As long as you don’t actually hit one of them, they’ll forget about you the second they see me.”

“I don’t hit ’em?”

“No, kid. It wouldn’t do a damn thing if you hit one anyway. Just swing that broom around, make a big show.”

The kid swallowed hard. Had an Adam’s apple like a kneecap. He bit his lip and nodded.

I gave him the broom. He wielded it like Excalibur.

I opened the door, and he charged out screaming, swinging it in broad strokes like a battleaxe.

The Chinese girl with the silver hair—that’s Jie, more on her later—punched straight through his chest. Sent his heart splattering into the wall. It almost hit me, as I ran for the window.

I tucked into a ball just as I hit the glass, and didn’t even try to break my fall.

My name is Carey, and I wasn’t always an asshole.

Well, I wasn’t always this much of an asshole.

Let me tell you about how I got here, and maybe you’ll understand.

TWO

Kaitlyn. 2013. Just off the 1-10, outside Quartzsite, Arizona.

A few years ago I had an ex-boyfriend who was into the Asian spirituality stuff. It didn’t seem to matter what kind of Asian: Buddhist, Shinto, some Hindu and yoga thrown in there—he was like spiritual fusion cuisine. Very Californian.

He wore his hair up in a frizzy little man bun, and had an eyebrow ring. Jackie gave me so much shit for dating him, but Jesus Christ, you should’ve seen his abs. Like a cobblestone street. And he could bend himself into a human pretzel, which was occasionally interesting. Plus he was always nice to me. A total dipshit, of course, but a nice one.

He tried to get me to meditate a few times. He said it was all about feeling your skin, really concentrating on the boundary between you and the world. Then feeling that skin get thinner and thinner until there was nothing separating you from everything else. I could never get it. I just wound up getting stupid thoughts stuck in my head: the lyrics to a silly pop song or something. He’d spend twenty minutes contemplating nirvana; I’d spend twenty minutes endlessly repeating the chorus to “Night Moves.” It wasn’t spiritually helpful.

Still, I didn’t have any better ideas on how to start. I sat cross-legged in the sand, trying to ignore the highway sounds coming over the bluff, the sun burning my skin, the particles of grit slowly grinding their way into my underwear.

I am not Kaitlyn. I am just this body. I am not this body. I am nothing.

An ant or something was crawling over my right ankle. Somewhere behind and above me, a tiny bird chirped. A dozen little itches sprang up all over my body. I could feel my hairs waving in the breeze. If the whole idea of meditation was to lose your sense of self-awareness, it wasn’t working. I was becoming, if anything, hyper-aware.

Way to totally fuck up Zen, Kaitlyn.

Maybe I need to go about this the completely opposite way. Get lost in my thoughts until I forget myself. Okay, so, what to think about?

Counting sheep? That’s for when you can’t fall asleep. Baseball? No, that’s sex. And that’s for guys. Plus I know jack about baseball. Uh . . .

Name all the Pokémon?

I wonder if I could still do that. It’s been years since I last played that game.

Nobody achieved nirvana by naming Pokémon, Kaitlyn. Jesus Christ!

I’d better figure out a way to get Zen, fast.

That’s probably the least Zen thought you can have.

I could sense Carey’s and Jackie’s eyes on me, already losing patience. We’d been burning road between Mexico and L.A., when I made them pull the car over like I had to throw up, then just got out and sat in the dirt. They probably wouldn’t give me much quiet time. To be honest, I’m surprised they let me have any. After all, I was the one with “the big idea”—and now here we are, parked on the side of a highway in the Arizona desert, the two of them drinking warm Tecate in the Camry while I sit in a pile of hot sand and totally fail to commune with the divine.

Trust me, I basically told them, I totally have this angel thing on lock. I’ll kill ’em all and have us done in time for happy hour.

In truth, I didn’t have a plan; I had a feeling. I felt that if I could just find and take one more angel, I could stop all of this. I did not have any more helpful feelings, like how to find one, or what to do afterward.

When Carey heard “find one more angel,” he said, “Let’s go to L.A.” That’s about as much as he’d share, but I wasn’t exactly an open book myself these days. I bit my tongue when he and Jackie asked what, exactly, happened back in Mexico. I looked the other way when they inquired about my “plan.” I pointed behind them and shouted “what in god’s name is that?!” when they had the gall to ask about the last time I slept.

Days, weeks, more? Exhausted but never tired. That’s not normal, that’s inhuman—

And let’s just put a stop to that thought-stream, shall we?

Meditating. That’s what we’re doing.

I couldn’t empty out my head. I just kept going back to that moment in Mexico, when I stepped sideways and blinked out of existence. Replaying it in my head. Trying to figure out exactly what I did. I know I felt something like a draft, coming from nowhere. Only it wasn’t warm, or cold, or even wind—just a faint influx of otherness. Something not here, or of here. I focused in on the draft, let it wash over me, and then I was gone. To a place that wasn’t anything. I couldn’t actually see it, in the conventional sense. But it was like standing in a foggy hall of mirrors, where each mirror reflected a reality that was slightly different than my own. I followed the mental image. Pictured the hall, imagined the mirrors.

What do you see?

Well, this one makes me look fat. That one makes my face looks long. Hey, this one makes me look short, and the other one kind of wobbles from side to side like—

This isn’t going to work.

I sighed.

Pikachu.

Bulbasaur.

Charizard.

Squirtle.

Blasto—

THREE

Jackie. 2013. Just off the 1-10, outside Quartzsite, Arizona.

“What about you?” Carey said, and gestured with his beer can toward Kaitlyn, sitting crisscross applesauce in a dry riverbed. “You go in for all this Hindu voodoo Jazzercise bullshit?”

“None of that was even slightly right,” I said.

I drained the last of my Tecate, which was now room temperature, provided that room was a hot trunk in the Arizona sunshine. I tossed the can on the floor in the backseat. Carey crumpled his and tossed it in the ditch running beside the shoulder. It landed next to a wadded up ball of aluminum foil with two bites of burrito inside, a few crumpled-up napkins, and six other half-crushed Tecate cans.

“Can you not litter?” I said to him.

Carey burped as loud as he could.

“What, am I ruining this pristine vista?” He swept his arm grandly over the sand, sand, more sand, handful of stunted bushes, and white girl quickly turning red.

“You’re such a dick,” I said. I cracked open another beer. Tasted like somebody had made tea out of cigarette butts.

“How long is she going to be out there?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “How long does it take to master bizarre teleportation powers stolen from an evil ball of light?”

“Like twenty minutes, tops.” Carey laughed. “Hey Jackie, you know what we could do to pass the time?”

“Fuck by the side of an active highway, in the backseat of this stolen 1996 Toyota Camry, on top of all the Red Bull cans and fast food wrappers, in like, 103-degree heat?”

Carey tapped his nose.

“I’ll pass. I’d rather juggle the balls of a rabid grizzly.”

“Well, our other option is watching Sitting Bull here contemplate her—whoa, what the hell?”

I followed his gaze to Kaitlyn. But there was no Kaitlyn. She was gone. I looked around: nothing but flat, featureless desert as far as the eye could see. What? There was nowhere to—she couldn’t even duck without us seeing her out there.

“Holy shit! Did you see where she went?” I grabbed Carey’s forearm, all loose flesh over wiry muscle.

He looked down at my hand.

“No, but I know what we can do to pass the time while we wait for her to—”

FOUR

Kaitlyn. 2013. Just off the 1-10, outside Quartzsite, Arizona.

Snorlax.

Goldeen.

Cubone.

Uh . . .

Mew.

Mew . . . two?

It was getting cold. Or at least not so sweltering hot anymore. How long had I been out here doing this? I opened my eyes and saw nothing but black.

What? No way it got this dark this quickly.

I rubbed my eyes. No help. I put my hand on the ground to push myself up, but there was no ground there. There was no up. There was no self to push. I could feel my body, was aware of its position in space, but I clearly wasn’t in the desert anymore. I wasn’t in anything. Just floating in a kind of dark, temperature-less amniotic fluid. I stared hard, trying to make out what was around me. In the distance, dim pinpricks of light struggled to resolve, then faded again. At first I thought they were faint, but as time went on it seemed more like they were just distant. I thought about moving closer to them. Pictured myself kicking my feet, swimming through—what? water? space?—toward the lights. I couldn’t tell if it was working.

Great. I meditated myself into the cosmic kiddie pool and now I have to just wait for an adult to come fish me out.

I felt the draft again. A foreign presence gently tickling my skin and raising the fine hairs on my forearms.

I’m going about this wrong. I’m still thinking physically. Trying to kick my feet. Picturing myself struggling through space, like that’s what this place was. Adjust your thinking, Kaitlyn.

I am not here. This is not a “here.” If I am not in this place—if this isn’t a place at all—then I am not pinned to a single location. I do not need to move. I simply need to exist elsewhere.

The blackness flashed, and instantly came alive with burning white stars. I couldn’t tell their exact distance or scale, relative to me. But I got the feeling they were small—around my own size. Which meant they were close, all bunched together in the space immediately surrounding me. I reached out to touch one—

No, that’s physicality again.

I made myself more aware of the orb nearest me. Inside of the light, something moved. Patterns like circuit boards. They expanded, contracted, changed shape. There was something wrong about the way the lines joined together. They met in impossible places, formed junctures that I couldn’t comprehend. It made me feel cold inside, and nauseous—the first feelings since I wound up here. I became dimly aware of a sound. Loud static and high-pitched squeals. Like a busy highway, if every other car was screeching to a halt. These weren’t stars.

They were angels.

Thousands of them. I looked further into the dark, and saw that they marched on into infinity. Forever, until their light was too faint to see. Not thousands—millions, billions.

I am not here. I am not actually surrounded by countless balls of fatal light that want nothing more than to simplify my code and nullify my internal existence. This is not happening. I’m just going to slooowly picture myself existing back where I was. Or you know what? Even farther away than that, so far I can’t even see the lights.

And just like that, they were gone. Everything was gone, even the blackness. Surrounding me was pure absence. A non-place. Colorless. Toneless.

And then, before me, something like a cube appeared. It was comprised of multiple thin, square layers, stacked one atop another. I got the sense I was supposed to do something with it. I tried to reach out to touch it, but I had no physical body.

Huh. Okay, let’s try another tack.

I thought about it spinning, and it spun.

Cool.

I thought about it getting closer, and it did. I focused in on the bottom layer, and it burst out of the cube, expanding until the non-place around me filled with stars, nebula, and planets. A thick cloud of brown dust swooped toward me. I tried to shield myself by reflex, but there was no point. I wasn’t here. My viewpoint swirled about in its depths, turning listlessly, and then it was gone. The cloud vanished into the distance. As it pulled away, I could see that the dust wasn’t entirely brown—when far enough removed, it took on colors and made patterns. Sweeping orange melted into dull crimson faded into dark purple. Stars engulfed me, burning the air beside me one second, then shrinking away until they were just pinpricks of light.

Oof. Enough of that.

It wasn’t vertigo, exactly, but the rapid sense of expansion left me feeling shaky and fragile. I focused on pulling the universe back together. It shrank, compacted into a shimmering plane, and slotted itself into the cube. Another layer began to pull out from the mass, but I mentally pushed it back in.

I didn’t need another demonstration. I got the message: Each of these thin cross-sections was a universe, carefully fit together to form a whole of something else: the cube.

Okay, so . . . what’s the point?

One by one, tiny pins of light stabbed through the bottommost layer of the cube. They were cold and featureless. I heard the dull roar of static when I focused in on one.

These were the angels I had seen earlier.

The next highest layer lit up: a pattern of angels almost, but not quite identical to those below it. And the next, and so on. Each layer’s layout of angels slightly different than the one below, slowly forming a three-dimensional pattern. Taken alone, in the seemingly flat planes, the angels were just isolated balls of light. When taken altogether, each layer building upon the other, another picture became clear: Sprawled throughout the universal cube was a mass of slowly writhing tentacles, made of pure, white, screaming light. An infinity of angels, each a separate being in their own universe, linked together throughout dimensions into a single, massive creature.

A word popped into my mind: “Siphonophora.” I’d learned it on a fifth-grade field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

“Who knows what this is?” the man with the big calves and the ponytail asked us.

A bunch of kids yelled out “jellyfish!”

Ponytail laughed.

“You’d think that, but no! This is a Portuguese man o’ war, and it’s not actually a jellyfish, but something we call a siphonophore.” He gestured toward the tank, and we all dutifully peered into the scratched glass to watch the gelatinous stringy blob undulate through the blue. “That means it’s not one big creature, but many smaller ones joined together into a single community that works together so closely, they can’t even live apart!”

I just nodded and let the information immediately slip out of my little kid brain. I wanted to see the otters. I could give a damn about jellyfish—unless they had little whiskers and held hands so they didn’t drift apart while they slept, jellyfish had nothing on otters. But all the information came flooding back now, looking at the disembodied spray of white tubes inhabiting the universal cube.

Not inhabiting. Infecting.

They were my thoughts, but they felt forced. Just like the Siphonophora memory, come to think of it. I’m the one thinking these things, but not the one telling me to think them.

This wasn’t a random happening. This was a presentation.

Something was showing this to me. I became aware of a presence out here with me in the non-space. Nothing visible or substantial, but I could still feel its bulk. Or weight, or . . . I don’t know. I only knew that it was indefinably, immeasurably vast. I felt like krill, drifting in the ocean, waiting for a whale to come by and feed.

Infected, came the thought again.

It was true: The siphonophore wasn’t just living in the cube, like a goldfish in a bowl. It was spreading through it. Where the tentacles of light passed through, the cube became wan and still. The siphonophore was careful not to occupy one space for too long, or return to it too frequently, giving the cube just enough time to regenerate before sucking the life out of it again. It wasn’t a natural inhabitant of the universal collective. It was a parasite. A colony that passed through every observable dimension, each single creature linking the energy it stole to the others.

If I had a body to shiver, I would have.

It was bad enough, thinking the angels were some race of otherworldly beings with evil intent. I, perhaps arrogantly, felt I could fight that somehow—but this? A whole universe is small to this thing. It spans every possible reality, twisting through the very core of existence. What could I do to this? Kill one angel—kill a thousand, a million—it wouldn’t even register to the whole. I’m nothing against this. I’m helpless.

The link is not just their strength, it’s also their weakness.

That thing again, thinking my thoughts for me.

What are you?

No response. Just that mental image of the whale again, drifting in space—slow, oblivious, eternal.

Why are you out here?

I felt the presence shift. It drew closer to the cube, and the siphonophore flared an angry, bare-bulb white.

Pain. Massive, incommunicable agony on a scale beyond comprehension. I felt shredded by it, like every atom of my body had been torn apart and flung in all directions with incredible force. But of course, I wasn’t really here. I had no body. When my mind recovered from the shock, I put it together.

The cube, the . . . the collection of universes and dimensions or whatever. Reality. That’s your home?

Nothing.

And the parasite, it kicked you out of there. Took over. Right?

Nothing.

Great. Now I’m getting the cold shoulder from a cosmic whale.

I don’t get it. I don’t get how to help you. I want to, I really do. That’s my home in there somewhere. It’s so small and utterly meaningless to things like you, I’m sure, but it’s all I’ve got and they’re killing it. If I can help, like you seem to think, you have to tell me how.

A layer slid out from the cube and wrapped itself around me. I had the sensation of falling from a great height, while simultaneously drowning in the deepest ocean, crushed by billions of tons of liquid force. Then the expansion stopped, and I found myself parked in the field of angels again. Frozen lights scattered through blackness.

For a very long time—or perhaps no time at all, it was hard to tell in here—nothing happened. Then my point of view shifted closer to the nearest angel. Closer again. Even closer, until I was practically inside of the thing. All I could see was furious screeching white, impossible angles, and sharp lines that twisted round and intersected themselves. I couldn’t take it. I tried to cover my eyes, pictured my hand coming up before my face. I brushed against the angel—maybe not my physical body, but my presence—and it recoiled. Thin brown cracks spread out from the point of contact, networking like veins or lightning strikes. They branched off and multiplied until the entire ball of light was overtaken. I’d seen something similar once before, when I’d been inside the angels, just before I shattered them. But it didn’t break apart this time, it just splintered and splintered until there was no surface left untainted.

The corrupted angel floated there inert, dull mud against the blanket of black. My point of view pulled back dramatically. I thanked god I didn’t have a stomach here, so I couldn’t puke in the space between dimensions. From my new angle, I was looking at an extreme close-up of the cube, at the point where two layers met. The inert angel I had just touched overlapped slightly with a still-brilliantly white one on the next layer. Slowly, the color began to seep from the brown orb to the white one, until it, too, was riddled with cracks. My point of view pulled out again, and again—each time showing me the same thing: cracks spreading from angel to angel, snaking up the tube of light until it was light no more. Fully outside the cube now, I could see the cracks spreading like a disease, from one tentacle to the next, poisoning the nest until the whole siphonophore was the color of a dead tree. When the last light diminished, the tentacles disintegrated entirely, dissolving into dust and disseminating into space.

That was the end of the show.

Nothing happened for a while.

I don’t know how to describe the feeling of an impossibly gigantic, creation-spanning creature waiting on a response from you. It was the sinking sensation you get after you’ve been pulled over, while you’re waiting for the cop to get out of his car and walk up to your window. But obviously multiplied by a number so large that it probably doesn’t technically exist.

Yeah, okay, yes.

I thought to myself, assuming the entity would pick it up.

I get it. The link is how I bring them down. I don’t kill thenext angel entirely, I just like . . . poison it somehow and let it spread. Right?

Nothing. It doesn’t like rhetorical questions, I guess.

So why me? I’m a freak, I get that. But what makes me different from the freaks that came before me? Why couldn’t they help you?

Bacteria. Or cells, or . . . something microscopic. A squiggly thing with two weird appendages snaking out. They reached toward a spiky blob. The thing and the blob fought. The blob won. The squiggly thing died. The scene repeated—this time there were three weird appendages on the squiggly thing. Fighting. Death. And again and again and again—more appendages, different shapes, the results always the same (death and death and death)—but there was progress made each time, until finally, the squiggly thing wrapped itself around the spiky blob, and absorbed it.

I’m like an . . . immune response? You’re just what, changing us a little bit each time, and then throwing us at the parasite until one of us finally wins?

No response.

That’s messed up.

A quaver.

We’re not bacteria.

A wobble.

FUCK. YOU.

The entirety of the non-space groaned, wavered, and abruptly transformed into the face of an extremely ugly, beaten-up old man with beer breath.

“Gah!” I yelled, and pushed the face away.

“What?! Jesus fuckin’ hell, Kaitlyn!” Carey said, falling backward out of the Camry’s passenger door and onto the warm asphalt of the 1-10, still searing in the Arizona sun.

“What happened? Where am I? How long was I gone?”

“I don’t know, like thirty seconds?” Carey said. “We just noticed you were missing and were about to go look for you—”

“I was about to go look for you,” Jackie corrected.

“I was gonna go too! I was just heading to the car first for a search-and-rescue burrito . . .”

“Then you just sorta popped up here in the backseat,” Jackie finished.

“It was only thirty seconds? It felt like days, maybe even weeks. . . .”

“Where the hell did you go?” Carey asked, pushing himself into a squatting position outside the car. He surreptitiously snuck a hand into the backseat. He rummaged around in the burrito bag without breaking eye contact.

“Outer space at first, and then this un-place beyond space where the universal cube was. . . .”

Jackie looked at me like you look at your grandma when she can’t remember your name. Carey was still feigning concern as he stole and unwrapped his burrito. Still giving me the knit-eyebrow “I’m listening” expression, even as he took the first bite.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said, pushing myself upright and scooting back up against the far door. I pulled my knees up and buried my face between them. The sun was stupidly bright, after spending so much time in the dark and the non-space. “I think I used my power again. Like I felt this draft of energy, so I followed it out, and something was waiting for me. . . .”

“The angels?” Jackie ventured.

“No, like a . . . a presence. I don’t know. It was massive. I got this kind of mental image of a sorta whale . . . like . . . thing, floating out in space.”

“And what did the space whale tell you to do, Kaitlyn?” Carey asked, still maintaining his fake concern, but obviously stifling laughter.

“God damn it, it made more sense while it was happening.” I looked to Jackie for understanding, but she was still giving me the “maybe it’s time for a nursing home” face. “It was real! It happened! And it told me what the angels are, and how to kill them. I think I even understand what I am now.”

Carey, mouth too full of burrito to talk, just rotated his wrist, indicating I should keep going.

“The angels aren’t just here, in our reality. They’re in every reality, and they’re linked between them. They’re their own creatures here, but they’re also part of this one massive colony so complex that it’s a whole different creature that exists across entire dimensions. And that colony-creature is sucking the life out of everything, everywhere. The angels solve life where they find it, and use the leftover energy to feed the rest of the colony, taking as much as they can without destroying the entire food source. It’s a massive parasite using the whole of existence as a host. That’s why the . . . the space whale . . . needs me. It can’t live here with the parasite.”

Neither Jackie nor Carey responded.

“I think, based on this sort of layered cube of universes that the entity showed me, that I finally get what it was I actually did back in Mexico. What I did just now. People like me, the mutations, we take some of an angel’s power when we kill it. I’m not teleporting from place to place; I’m stepping between dimensions like the angels do.”

“This is a super helpful space whale,” Carey said, not bothering to suppress the laughter this time.

“Are you sure this wasn’t like, a dream, or a hallucination or something, K?” Jackie shoved Carey out of the way and knelt on the seat across from me. She put her hands on my knees and stared right into my eyes.

“No—or maybe yes, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still true.”

Jackie bit her lip.

“What, you’ve seen angels that solve people like math problems, and tar men that melt your skin, and immortal B-list celebrity psychos, and you’re drawing the line here? This is the thing that’s too absurd to believe?”

Jackie peered back over her shoulder at Carey, who was squatting on the side of the highway powering through a cold burrito so hard he was eating bits of the aluminum foil. He shrugged.

“I guess not? I don’t know, K. This whole deal—going back to L.A. at all, much less going there to look for the angels and the faceless dudes—it doesn’t seem very . . . not stupid.”

“Well, you don’t have to come,” I snapped.

Right, Kaitlyn. This is Jackie’s fault. She doesn’t believe in your magic space whale and doesn’t want to die fighting an inter-dimensional parasite. She’s being totally unreasonable.

“No really, you don’t though,” I said, and put my hands over hers. “And I don’t mean that in an angry way, or a hurt way—you really don’t have to come. It’s so risky. I told you before: Nobody will blame you for bailing. We’ll still be okay. I’ll be okay. You can get out of this and just go be safe.”

“Aw,” Carey said, wadding up his empty aluminum foil into a ball and tossing it blindly over his shoulder. “Thank you!”

“Not you, asshole,” I said. “I was just talking about Jackie. You got me into this crap, you’re damn well seeing it through to the end.”

Carey laughed. “I don’t care why you’re doing it, I’m on board as long as we’re killing angels and their little butt-buddies.”

“I’m on board because it’s you, K. Not because the space whale told you to, or because I think it’s a good idea to go picking fights with light bulbs that disintegrate people. I’m on board because I’m always on board with you and your stupid, stupid plans.”

I smiled at Jackie.

“That’s not me, Jackie,” I said. “You’re always the one with the dumb ideas, and I’m always along for the ride.”

“Yeah, well . . .” She backed out of the car ass-first, and Carey made a big show of watching. “Turnabout is fair play.”

She held out her hand to help me up, and I took it.