The Fallen 4 (6 page)

“No, it wasn’t,” Aaron said sadly.

“Reality is mean.”

“Yeah, it can be.” Aaron flopped onto his back, throwing his arm across his eyes, feeling sadder than he had in quite some time.

“I can help you,”
Gabriel said after a few moments.

Aaron lifted his arm to look at his dog.

“I can help you,”
he said again, scooting closer and nudging his blocky head beneath Aaron’s hand.

Aaron hesitated, but then stroked the fine yellow fur atop the Labrador’s head. Slowly Aaron realized that this was exactly what he had to do—what he
needed
to do.

For petting Gabriel would take away the lingering pain of his dreams.

*   *   *

Melissa tried to rest but couldn’t.

She lay in her bed, eyes closed, trying to will herself to sleep. But it just wasn’t happening.

Rather than stare at the cracked plaster ceiling, she got up to go for a walk, and found herself at the back of the school, where the remains of a greenhouse stood near the makeshift graves of her friends.

Melissa seemed to be the only one of them who felt compelled to visit the dead. But it had been some time since even she had come. The wildflowers she’d left on the graves had either withered or blown away.

“Hey, guys,” she said, doing her best to remember each of the fallen Nephilim.

She wasn’t sure if all of them would have considered her a friend or not, but she liked to think of them that way because of the experiences that they had shared.

Janice’s grave was first. Melissa remembered the quiet black-haired girl with fondness, how they’d bonded over a love for really bad horror movies.

“Hey, you,” Melissa said, kneeling in the dirt, imagining her friend’s cheerful face. “How’s it going?” She picked up some dried flowers and tossed them aside. “Things have been pretty nuts here, as you can imagine, but we’re doing okay.”

She paused, eyes wandering to the other graves.

“I’m still alive anyway.”

Melissa didn’t want to exclude the others, so she stood to address them all. “We really miss you guys,” she said, remembering Kirk, William, Samantha, and Russell, and how brave they’d been when their end had come. “We could really use your help now.”

She felt stupid for a moment, certain that her friends would rather be above the ground. Then she remembered the world in which she now lived, and seriously wondered who had the best deal.

From inside the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt, Melissa removed a handful of pretty colored rocks that she’d found on a remote beach in New Zealand. She and Vilma had dispatched a nest of sea serpents there that had been preying on local fishermen. Having grown up in Kansas, the stones were unlike anything
Melissa had ever seen before. She’d kept them as a keepsake. She knew the graves of her friends needed to remain unmarked, just in case anybody in the outside community should stumble upon the property.

But these stones could be their markers.

Melissa looked through the colorful rocks, polished shiny and smooth by the ocean waves, and selected one for each grave, the colors she chose representing something she remembered about each of her friends.

Yellow for Kirk because it was the color of his hair. Blue for William because of his piercing stare. Black for Janice because of her nail polish…

When she was done, Melissa stood back to admire her work.

“Much nicer than dried-up old flowers,” she told them, and wondered what color stone would be placed upon her grave when she was gone. She figured she would be lucky to even have a grave, guessing that she’d likely end up in the belly of some sort of monster.

She’d thought of it as a joke, but suddenly realized that there might be some truth there. The reality of their situation, and the world in which they now lived, weighed heavily upon her.

A tingle ran down her spine, and Melissa felt as though she were being watched. She turned to see that she was right. Cameron stood behind her, his wings out, sword of fire clutched tightly in his hand.

He was dressed for battle.

*   *   *

Cameron thought he might find Melissa in the makeshift graveyard. He doubted that she could sleep any more than he could.

He’d honestly tried to settle down, but just the thought of those things out there… Images of the walking nightmares he had slain in his time as a Nephilim raced through his mind and kept him from being able to close his eyes.

Melissa left where their friends had been buried to approach him.

“What are you doing like that?” she asked. “Something going on?”

“I’m going out,” he told her.

“Against Vilma’s wishes?” Melissa asked. “Are you crazy? She’s going to be royally pissed.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “Besides, she’s so wrapped up with Aaron that I’ll be back before she even knows that I’ve gone.”

“What if I tell her?”

“I guess that answers my question.” He avoided her eyes.

“What question?” Melissa asked.

“If you’re going with me or not.”

“Look,” the girl said. “I understand where you’re coming from, I really do, but there has to be some chain of command. We can’t just fly off to do battle whenever we feel like it.”

“Why not? It’s what we were created to do.”

Melissa folded her arms. “I just don’t think it’s very smart.
We should wait until Aaron wakes up, and then—”

“And how many people will die during that time?” Cameron interrupted.

“Don’t pull that on me,” Melissa warned.

“I’m not pulling anything on you,” he said. “It’s a serious question, one I’ve been wrestling with since Vilma told us to stand down.”

“You know why she asked us to stop,” Melissa said. “We can’t keep going the way we’re going. We’re going to get tired. Sloppy. Make mistakes. Then how many people will die because of us?”

Cameron shook his head, refusing to acknowledge the girl’s point. “I’m not going to make mistakes,” he told her. “Not when lives are at stake.”

“Like you have control over that?”

“I’m going.” Cameron spread his wings, preparing to wrap himself in their embrace.

“Cameron, please,” Melissa begged.

“Will you cover for me?” he asked as his wings closed around him and he remembered the last place from the news broadcast.

Where he was needed.

Melissa didn’t answer, but he saw a look in her eyes as he closed his wings, a look that said that she wished she were brave enough to disobey and join him in battle.

*   *   *

Walking home from the market, Jeremy glanced down the narrow, sloping side streets that would take him to the main street, which ran through the village of Southwold, on the edge of the vast, churning gray ocean.

He remembered when he and his mother had vacationed here, how important those times had been in his childhood. Other than those times, there had been mostly misery. Tempted to walk down to the shore, Jeremy reminded himself that there was a hungry mouth, other than his mother’s, waiting for his return.

The baby formula was ridiculously expensive, and he had seriously considered slipping a can or two beneath his shirt on his way out the door, but had thought better of it. Best to keep a low profile, and being nicked by the local constabulary didn’t quite fit into those plans.

Using what little his mother had had in a savings account, they had traveled to Southwold. It was the off-season, so they’d managed to get a decent enough cottage for a reasonable monthly price. The vacation cottage wasn’t too far from the one that his mother had rented for them long ago.

Holding the bag of groceries in one hand, Jeremy fished the key from his pocket, and was just about to slip it inside the lock, when the door opened. His mother held the crying infant, whom she insisted on calling Roger.

“It’s about time,” she said, bouncing the squealing red-faced child on her hip.

“I went as quick as I could,” Jeremy said, shutting the door behind him with a flip of his leg.

“The poor thing is starving,” his mother said, kissing the top of the wailing child’s head.

“How many times a day does the bugger eat, anyway?” he asked, emptying the contents of the paper sack onto the tiny kitchen table.

“He’s a growing boy,” his mother said, and the child grew louder.

“But it doesn’t seem right. He’s always squealing to be fed.” Jeremy turned from the fridge, and his mother suddenly thrust the screeching creature into his arms.

“Take him while I mix his formula.”

Jeremy had no choice but to accept the rather unpleasant gift. It was either that or let the infant drop to the floor, which would have just led to even more noise.

“Bounce him on your hip like I did,” his mother said as she went about making the child’s meal.

Jeremy tried to do as his mother suggested, not wanting to hurt the shrieking blighter.

“And walk around,” she added. “He likes it when you walk around.”

Jeremy bounced the crying babe, and walked into the sitting room, where the television was on BBC One. A news program reported on the state of the world.

And it was nothing pleasant.

He moved from foot to foot as the reporters discussed the increasing darkness and the strange new life-forms that were appearing across the planet.

Jeremy felt bad for the newsreaders. They were doing everything in their power not to call these emerging life-forms what they actually were.

Monsters. The world is overrun with monsters.

Jeremy again had to wrestle with the fact that he was here, with his mother and the mysterious Baby Roger, and not with his fellow Nephilim in the States. His mother swore that this was where he was supposed to be. And for some strange reason Jeremy believed her.

It was then that Jeremy noticed Roger had ceased his squalling. He was about to note that his mother had been right about the bouncing and walking too, when he noticed that the child’s huge, unblinking eyes were staring at the telly.

As if listening to every word.

CHAPTER FOUR

M
ost of the time, Mallus did not miss the ability to fly.

Throughout the millennia he’d lived in the world of man, he’d found that humanity was constantly improving how they traveled from here to there. Horseback became horse-drawn cart and carriages; sailing ships evolved into steamships, locomotives, then automobiles, and finally taking to the sky with airplanes.

He was always fascinated by what these humans came up with, though at one time, he could have wrapped himself in his wings and been anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds.

The twin scars upon his shoulder blades grew warm and began to itch. Today of all days Mallus wondered what it was that made him think of his feathery appendages. Could it have been the escalating crowds in the New York subway station?
The squeeze of impatient bodies on the platform as they waited for a delayed train?

Or was it the changes that he felt in the world around him? Changes he had feared for a very long time. Changes that he tried to ignore, which yipped at him like dogs desperate for attention.

Mallus leaned against the wall at the far end of the subway station, rubbing his back across the tiles in an attempt to alleviate his discomfort. The scars had not bothered him for centuries, and he found it disconcerting that they would act up now.

More of the city’s occupants poured down into the crowded station. From where he stood, Mallus could see umbrellas and coats dripping with moisture. It must have started raining, which explained the volume in the station, but not why it had been so long since a train had run through.

All he could do was wait, surrounded by the creatures he had grown to love, even at their most foul.

“Where’s the damn train?” a large man dressed in a black suit and sporting a thick white beard grumbled under his breath. “The whole damn world is going to Hell.”

Mallus didn’t have the heart to tell the man he was right.

The signs were there for anyone with the knowledge to read them. They had been for quite some time. And during the last month these signs had become blatantly obvious. A part of Mallus wished that he was as painfully oblivious as humanity.

He wished he didn’t know what the Architects were planning.

The crowd in the subway station grew so that there wasn’t any more space on the platform, but Mallus didn’t mind. He allowed their emotions to wash over him, anger, impatience, and annoyance. He breathed in the aroma of their human funk.

For he would miss it when they were gone.

*   *   *

The last report Cameron had heard before Vilma had shut off the television had been about a disturbance in the New York City subway system.

It was in an area he knew well from when he’d lived in the city. The picture of the tunnel formed inside his head, growing more and more detailed—more and more specific as his angelic ability zeroed in on where he wanted—
needed
—to be.

The damp stink of the underground passage, along with something else that he couldn’t quite identify, assailed his sense of smell as his wings unfolded deep within the subway tunnel. He was immediately at the ready, a sword of fire igniting in his hand as his eyes adjusted to the dim light.

Cameron used the burning blade as a torch, lighting the pockets of shadow in his search for a possible threat. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he started down the tracks, eyes darting here and there, searching for a sign of what had brought him there.

Around the bend he found a darkened train.

Part of him—his angelic nature—wanted to leap into action, sword flashing. But his calmer, human side wanted to
be sure that such a reaction was necessary. He was certain that this wasn’t the first set of subway cars to ever lose power, and they were probably waiting either to be pushed into the next station or for some minor repairs to get them moving again.

He moved closer to the back of the last car, trying to see inside the vehicle, but he could only make out the shapes of heads and bodies of people in the dimness of the emergency lighting. Tempted to go on ahead of the stranded car, to check out the tunnel in front or ahead in the next station, Cameron remembered Aaron words during training with his fellow Nephilim.