Gabe tossed two bags on the floor. "Thrift store in town," he said by way of explanation.
Melinda opened one -- boys' clothing. She handed it to Caleb, who picked out a pair of worn jeans and a red NASCAR t-shirt. The other bag also had boys' clothing, but anything was better than the scratchy woolen dresses that she had worn for three years on the compound.
She picked a pair of cutoffs and a tank top, and found a denim jacket. For shoes, there was a pair of Keds, a turquoise plaid that was a half-size too big, but they would do. She put those on, too, trying not think about whose feet had been in them -- beggars not being choosers and all that.
In the meantime, Gabe had set out a row of Styrofoam containers on the dresser and a twenty-ounce bottle of Coke. She grabbed it and chugged it, feeling the sugar and caffeine hit her system like a freight train. She was never very fond of Coca Cola, not until she was in a place where it was forbidden. It had become an obsession of hers, to taste the "synthetic poison", as her aunt and uncle called it.
Now, she felt as if the world had taken on an extra bit of clarity, and she felt her heart kick-start into another gear, slightly faster than normal.
She grinned. It was wonderful.
The intoxicating aroma of fried chicken -- real, crispy, spiced, fried chicken, something else she hadn't tasted in three years -- cool and creamy coleslaw, buttery biscuits and gravy -- made her mouth water. Gabe opened one container, found a drumstick, took a bite. Melinda piled the food onto her foam plate. She was absolutely ravenous!
But Caleb merely watched them. It unsettled her that he didn't eat but she decided not to press the matter. He was probably just not comfortable with eating human food, she thought, and hoped that he would get hungry enough to be curious if they just would leave him be.
"So what's the plan now?" Gabe asked, tossing the bone aside and taking up a wing this time. The meat was tender, slipping off the bone like butter on a hot pan.
Melinda opened her mouth to say something, only she realized that she had no plan. Escape from the compound had been the only thing that had mattered to her for three years. She put a piece of gravy-drenched biscuit into her mouth and chewed, thinking about it.
"I could live with you?" she said, pitching it like a question.
Gabe shook his head. "You can't -- you know that. It's not decent. And I don't love you like that, kid."
"I'm fifteen," she said. "They were going to marry me. Fuck decency. And yes, you do."
Outwardly, the world hadn't changed that much in three years. Gabe still had the surfer-boy cut he sported when she first introduced herself to him and his mother.
"I'm Melinda Perrera," she had said, thrusting a tin of cookies that she'd baked at them. "We're going to be neighbors."
He was nice to her, the way a big brother might be. When he took her to the movies, he held her hand through the scary parts, but she kept on holding it after they were over. He never did more than that, though. "My little kid sister," he sometimes said, laughing as he mussed her hair.
He thinks I'm still that little girl, she realized.
Inwardly though, a great deal had changed -- in her, and perhaps in him, too.
No, not yet.
"No, I don't," he said now, but he swallowed, and she could sense the terror in his voice. It had literally never occurred to him that she would grow up, that he could love her like that. "You -- " he faltered. You're more of a sister to me, she knew that was what he was going to say. But the words hung in the air, unspoken because he suddenly realized that they were no longer true. Her certainty frightened him, as did the jumbled mess of his feelings about her.
"You need to do something about your hair," he said.
The dodge worked. Melinda was mildly annoyed that he had changed the subject but he was right -- her hair was still coiled up in the elaborate system of braids that the women of the compound wear. It would identify her in a heartbeat.
He reached into the bottom of one of the paper bags and pulled out a cheap pair of hair shears.
"Well, come on," he said, going into the bathroom where the greenish lighting made everybody looked faintly dead.
The women of the compound cried when their hair was cut -- it was how the elders chose to punish relatively minor sins like not keeping an immaculate house. But for her, it was a relief to see the chestnut-brown locks fall away. In the terrible lighting, Gabe did a horrible job so in the end, she had to trim her brand-new bangs herself.
She hoped the pageboy look would keep people from staring. Her features were very regular, utterly unremarkable -- olive skin, large hazel eyes, grubby features of a youngish man. Or she would be just another pretty, poor girl with a DIY-haircut and thrift-store clothes.
"What's with the angel, anyway?" Gabe asked, watching her as she smoothed the jagged fringe of her hair.
"You can see them, too?" That's the other reason she liked him so much. When she told him that she could see them, he didn't automatically say that she was crazy like so many other people did. He merely nodded, and listened. He didn't believe her, not then, yet he did not try to burst her bubble. But he believed now.
"No, but I kinda assumed, after what happened last night..." he said, leaving the sentence unfinished. He left the bathroom. She kept snipping, concentrating on keeping her hand steady.
"Um, Melinda?"
"Yeah?"
"Where is he?"
She felt a lump form in her throat and fought back a wave of nausea as she went to confirm what she was inexplicably terrified about.
The bed where Caleb was curled up on was empty. The silvery aura, the wall of flames -- she didn't exactly believe in being able to see the future. But right now, she had a very bad feeling that something terrible was going to happen.
"We have to find him," she said after a long silence.
"Why?"
She looked at him, her heart starting to race. She was about to say, We just do, I know it, when, in the distance, an explosion lights up the horizon.
She pointed at the fireball.
"That's why."
Chapter Five
HUNTER GREEN had always hated his name.
It was just so stupid, being named after a color, though he supposed it was slightly better than "Red" or that baby that had been in the news recently -- "Blue Peony" or something like that.
Still, he'd put up with it for forty-three years until the day his wife had laughingly referred to him as "faded". He went out and changed his name, bought a 1984 Cadillac Eldorado with a hard top, cashed out his retirement savings, and just kept driving.
He was now, according to his driver's license, Grendel Weiss, a name which suited the monstrosity of the suburban life he had escaped and the meandering way with which he was now making his way across the country, beholden only to gravity and the fuel gauge.
"You have such a wonderful life," his co-workers would sigh, when his wife and children would show up at TruLife's corporate functions. And it was true. There wasn't really anything to complain about. His wife managed the household well, his kids were well-behaved even as teenagers, their house was paid off, their cars worked, and they still had sex.
But it wasn't his life he was living. At work, he was constrained by the intransigence of both upper management and labor regulations. At home, his wife would nag at him to pick up his shoes and walk the dog and mow the God-damned lawn, for Chrissakes. He'd kept, in his desk drawer at work, legal pads filled with sketches of worlds he'd imagined; creatures both real and fake. In the garage, during his precious minutes when he didn't have anything to do, he worked these images into clay sculptures, the beauty and the terror in the final product surprising him.
"Artist wages don't support a family," his wife would say when she saw him scraping at the clay.
Now that he was on the open road, he wondered what took him so long to leave.
He's eating asphalt on Route 40 through Oklahoma, with the top down and Bon Jovi blasting on the tape deck,
and thinking about what to do when he got to California. His chin was scratchy -- it had been nearly two weeks since he drove out of the dealer's lot and in that time he hadn't shaved at all. He glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror -- he looked like a dirty old man, the kind of guy that leered at young women on the subway. That wouldn't bode well for job prospects out there. And he would need a suit or something. Maybe find a small art house studio where they could use someone to do design. He'd have to bluster his way in. But he'd worked selling insurance for twenty years -- bluster was what he did.
But what he would never again do was work in an office.
Ugly fluorescent lighting, good-bye.
He was feeling the mild buzz of the three beers he had at the pizza joint a few miles back when he saw him. Or her? A boy, he finally decided, but the hair was too long and kids these days were now gay and trans and all kinds of nonsense. Whatever happened to the good old days, when you sat down and shut up and did what you were told? Spoiled, the lot of them.
But the kid was alone, and even though he was feeling mildly cantankerous, there was enough of his father-instinct left in him to feel sorry for the kid. Never knew what sort of shit he would run into out here, especially now that it was getting dark, he thought as he pulled over.
"Want a ride?"
The kid -- it was a boy, he was sure of it now -- merely looked at him and blinked slowly.
"I'm heading west," he said, getting a little nervous. "Don't worry, I'm not a pervert or anything." As he said that, he realized what he must look like -- slightly drunk, unshaven, in a convertible where the floor was littered with fast-food wrappers and receipts, trying to pick up a kid walking down the highway. If that doesn't scream "pervert", I don't know what does. "Really," he added, as if that would help.
The kid considered it for a moment, cocking his head. Then he moved to get into the car. The kid's movements seemed a bit off, as if he had to consider every motion before he could execute it. Then again, what did Hunter -- Grendel -- the name took some getting used to -- Grendel knew about kids? True, he was a dad, but it was really his wife doing the kid-raising. He was just the allowance-dispenser. As he pulled back onto the highway, he smiled at the kid, his beer-addled brain trying to come up with passable small talk.
"So... where ya from?"
The kid shrugged. He was pale, his hair so blond it was almost white. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a red t-shirt, but no shoes. Grendel wondered how long he had been walking. The pizza joint was a good 20 minutes ago by his speeding car, and the next town wasn't due for another thirty miles.
"You got a name? I'm Grendel." It pleased him to hear how natural it sounded, coming out of his mouth. Grendel. He could see himself shaking hands as he spoke it.
"They called me Caleb."
"Caleb's a cool name," Grendel said, relief washing over him. The ice had been broken, the hard part done. "Old-fashioned, but modern."
"My name is not Caleb."
What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Grendel wondered. He glanced next to him. The boy seemed faded, somehow -- translucent, almost. I must be more drunk than I thought, Grendel thought, and slowed the car down to the speed limit so that he didn't get pulled over.
Or, at least, he tried to.
He wanted to lift his foot off the gas, but instead it pushed the pedal to the floor. The engine roared, and he watched in horror as the speedometer ratcheted above 100, then 120, and then hit 140. But still they were careening faster and faster. Hunter Green was acutely aware of both the impossibility of this and the reality, but he was helpless to do anything about it.
The car crested a low hill, soaring into the air. Hunter gasped in amazement as they glided over the wheat growing on either side of the highway, and for a moment he was enraptured by the sensation of true freedom and flight.
But only for a moment, because the car burst into a fireball.
He was not even aware of being vaporized. He was just... dead.
And there was just nothing.
Chapter Six
MELINDA DIDN'T HAVE MUCH HOPE of finding anything as they got closer to where they saw the fireball. It was only a few miles, but how could Caleb have gotten so far in such a short time? And what was he doing?
"He's an angel, of course he could go as far as he wanted. But I thought angels were supposed to be good?" Gabe said as he drove towards the smoke.
"Apparently, not all of them are," she said shortly. "I don't know -- he was in such pain--"
Singed wheat stalks indicated that they were getting close. The asphalt smoldered. Gabe put the Jeep into four-wheel-drive again and turned off the highway onto the soft shoulder. They began to crunch over things. Melinda leaned out the side. There was just enough light left to see that Gabe had driven over a Cadillac emblem. Apparently, this was all that was left of the car.
"I think we're here," Gabe said, cutting the engine. They had stopped at the edge of a scrim of whitish dust in the shape of a vague circle. Melinda stepped out of the Jeep. There was nothing except melted asphalt, burned wheat, and scorched earth.
She felt a sense of disappointment creep up on her. What were you hoping to find?
"Maybe he went up in flames, too?" Gabe suggested as he joined her.
"No," she said, closing her eyes. She felt the earth under her feet, and filled her lungs with the bitter scent of burning asphalt and dirt.
What are you doing, Caleb? she thought.
There was no response. Not that she expected one.
She shuffled through the dirt, aimless, and afraid. How could she have been so wrong about him? She tried to remember her first impressions of him when the farmer who found him brought him before the elders. Yes, he was definitely an angel. He had the aura that was oddly pale even then, but she hadn't thought anything of it. He also had the ethereal wings of smoke that she had seen on the others.
Melinda could sense Gabe watching her and she turned to look at him. He had got a worried look on his face as he leaned against the Jeep. If you don't love me like that, you certainly worry like you do, she thought.
"I can't -- I don't know why I expected I'd get anything from this," she said, sweeping her arm at the ring of devastation around them. "I don't know why we should even bother..." The frustration, exhaustion, and terror of the last twenty-four hours finally caught up with her, and she crumpled to the ground, balling her fists and pressing them against her eyes.
And then she saw something behind her eyelids.
A wide expanse. A string of lights on the starlit horizon. A road.
She jerked to a sitting position, frantically looking around her to see what had changed. Her legs, in the cutoffs -- the dirt -- she plunged her hands into the dirt, and the vision that she saw came back to her, details flooding her mind.
The cool, dry air. The mountains in the background. The worn paint on the road, the trees popping up in the background.
It was not just a string of lights -- it's a city.
A sign on the right. A name.
"Gabe," she shouted as she stood up. Gabe flinched -- he was a lot closer to her than she thought. She grimaced an apology. "I know where he's going. He gets stronger with every person that he kills. We need to hurry." She began running back to the Jeep. Then she realized that Gabe wasn't keeping up.
"What is it now?" she asked.
"Well," he says, coughing into his elbow. "You saw what he did to those cult members."
She nodded.
"And you see this smoking crater. Forgive me for being a little cynical about how enthusiastic he's going to be to see us."
"He won't hurt us," she said. But even as she said it, she wondered about it. Would Caleb know her as the one who saved him? Would he accept that he owed her a favor? Doubt tickled her mind.
Up until now, she had been feeling her way through this whole matter, but now Gabe had injected a modicum of sense and rationality into the mix. And the sensible thing to do would be to call the a
uthorities, let them deal with Caleb.
It would be nice, she thought, to let him be someone else's problem.
And then she realized how tired she still was, because it was a full five seconds before she realized what a stupid idea that was.
"He might not be glad to see us," she said. "But what are we going to do? Call in the National Guard?"
"I dunno. Can't we like, find a demon to take him down or something?"
She almost punched him for that. But then she reminded herself that Gabe couldn't see them. He had no idea what they looked like, the things they could do. To him, the forces they were dealing with were probably no scarier than the imaginary monsters kids had under their beds.
She had seen one, she wanted to tell him. On her last Halloween, she had gone trick-or-treating with her friends and was on her way home when it happened. It was late, and then all of the streetlights started flickering. She froze, stupid girl that she was. It was pure luck that the creature she saw -- a snake-like thing, black as an oil slick, with the head of a dinosaur, and sixteen glowing red eyes and a gaping hole for a mouth -- was not a particularly intelligent demon nor a very hungry one. A body with a fading golden aura struggled feebly from its mouth.
She had never mentioned it to anyone.
"Demons -- they're not like -- you can't just talk to them," she sputtered.
Gabe shrugged. "If you say so," he said.
"Besides, I've got no idea how to catch one, or how to make it do what I want. And they look nothing like those cartoon devils you see, with two stupid little horns and a trident."
"So what do they look like?" Gabe asked as they got into the Jeep.
"Scary," she said, in a tone that said this conversation was over.
Gabe glanced at her curiously.
"I saw one," she said, finally. "It was--"
She was interrupted by Gabe's pants playing Nickelback. He took out his phone, swiped it, then put it to his ear.
"Jess-- hi... yeah, I was just going to call you."
Chapter Seven
MELINDA DIDN'T KNOW whether to be amused or to strangle him.
She knew, intellectually, that after they took her away, there was no indication that she was ever coming back and that Gabe probably would meet someone new. On the other hand, he did follow her directions, driving three-hundred miles east, to rescue her. And buy her a Coke.