World After (Penryn & the End of Days 2)

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.