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.
Chpater 10
IN THE END, the only thing we bring back is what’s left of the few dead scorpions that we found scattered beneath the rubble, and their one surviving victim, Clara.
When we park in front of the school, Sanjay walks with her, quietly asking her questions. I don’t have to ask her anything to know that she just wants to find her husband and kids. Everyone who sees her moves away, looking like they think she’s contagious.
When I get back to our history class, the stench of rotten eggs hits me as soon as I open the door. The windowsills are lined with cartons of old eggs. Somehow, my mother has managed to find a stash of them.
Mom is out. I don’t know what she’s doing or where she is but that’s pretty normal for us.
Paige sits on her cot with her head down so that her hair covers her stitches, and I can almost pretend not to see them. Her hair is as shiny and healthy as any seven-year-old’s. She’s in a flower-print dress, tights, and pink high-top sneakers that dangle over the edge of the cot.
“Where’s Mom?”
Paige shakes her head. She hasn’t said much since we found her.
On a chair beside her cot is a bowl of chicken soup with a spoon sitting in it. Looks like Mom hasn’t had much luck feeding her. When was the last time Paige ate? I pick up the bowl and sit on the chair.
Lifting a spoonful of soup, I move it toward her. But Paige won’t open her mouth.
“Aaand the train goes into the tunnel.” I give her a little clown smile as I push the spoon toward her mouth. “Choo-choo!” It used to work when she was really little.
She peeks up at me and tries to smile. She stops when the stitches begin to crinkle.
“Come on, it’s delicious.” There is meat in it. I had laid down the law and declared that Paige could no longer be a vegetarian as soon as we started having trouble finding food. Maybe that’s what keeps her from trying the soup?
Maybe not.
Paige shakes her head. She’s no longer throwing up, but she’s no longer trying to eat either.
I put the spoon down into the bowl. “What happened when you were with the angels?” I ask as gently as I can. “Can you talk about it?”
She looks at the floor. A tear sparkles on her lashes.
I know she can talk because she’s called me “Ryn-Ryn” like she used to when she was little, and “Mom” or “Mommy.” And “hungry.” She’s said that several times.
“It’s just us. Nobody else is listening. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
She shakes her head slowly, looking at her feet. A tear drops onto her dress.
“Okay, we don’t have to talk about that right now. We’ll never talk about it if you don’t want to.” I set the bowl on the floor. “But do you know what you can eat?”
She shakes her head again. “Hungry.” The whisper is so quiet that I barely hear it. Her lips hardly open to talk, but I can still catch a glimpse of her razor teeth.
My insides churn. “Can you tell me what you’re hungry for?” A part of me desperately wants to know the answer. But the rest of me dreads what she might say.
She hesitates before she shakes her head “no” again.
My hand comes up without me thinking about it. I’m about to stroke her hair like I’ve always done. She looks up at me, and her hair falls away from her stitches.
Crude, uneven stitches crisscross her face. The stitches that run between her lips and ears give her a forced grin that cuts her face. Red, black, and bruised, they scream for attention. They run down her neck and into her dress. I wish there wasn’t one cutting across her neck like they’d sewn her head onto her body.
My hand hesitates over her head, almost touching her hair but not quite.
Then I drop it back to my side.
I turn away from Paige.
A pile of clothes sits on my mother’s cot. I dig through for jeans and a jersey. Mom didn’t bother ripping off the tags, but she has already sewn a yellow starburst on the bottom of the pant leg for protection from the boogeyman. I don’t care so long as it’s dry and doesn’t smell too badly of rotten eggs.
I change out of my wet clothes. “I’m going to see if I can find something else for you to eat. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
Paige nods, looking at the floor again.
I leave, wishing I had a dry jacket to cover my sword. I consider wearing the wet one but decide against it.
The school sits on a prime corner with a grove owned by Stanford University across one street and a high-end strip mall across another. I wander over to the shops.
My dad always said there was a lot of money in this area and even the strip malls show it. Back in the day, in the World Before, you could see Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, eating breakfast here while he was still a living resident of Silicon Valley. Or catch Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, grabbing a bite with his friends.
They all looked like middle managers to me but my dad was into all that. Technocrats, he called them. I’m pretty sure I saw Zuckerberg digging the latrine ditch beside Raffe at the camp a few days ago. I guess a billion dollars doesn’t buy much respect in the World After.