Natural Born Angel (Immortal City 2)

“I might as well get it over with,” Maddy said. She reached in her bag, pulling out the phone. Her stomach flipping, she looked down at the screen.

It was a text from Mark.

It read: “You’re in.”

CHAPTER 6

Darkness reigned along the Angel City street, an unnatural quiet whispering in the fronds of the palms as they rustled in the night above. A block or two away, the occasional car would pass along the sleepy streets, its headlights brightly burning before leaving the night to its darkness and silence. Two streetlamps cast a hard orange glare on the street at the end of the block, and a crisp white security light shone right in front of the building. The rest was shrouded in darkness.

The darkened palms, shifting softly back and forth with the warm night wind, were the only witness to the two dark figures that crept silently towards the offices.

Without exchanging a word, they moved quickly along the pavement, passing the thick glass doors of the impressive building and heading to a service door off to the side. One, slightly shorter, carried a boxlike object under his arm. Both wore dark masks that covered most of their faces. Etched perfectly on the glass façade of the structure were the words ANGEL ADMINISTRATION AFFAIRS.

The two paid no attention to the lights still on in the fourth-floor offices. With complete precision, the two dark figures worked in concert. The first placed the metal box on the ground, opening it slightly. His hands reached inside, his fingers working quickly at some unknown task. The other stepped to the service door. Looking back and forth first, he pressed a gun-like object to the steel door. He pulled the trigger. The device obliterated the door’s metal lock. The THWOOMP of the mechanism echoed into the night. But then all was quiet.

The figure crouched at the box turned to look up at his partner by the door. The latter nodded slightly. Closing the box, the squatting figure carefully lifted it under his shoulder once again and moved to the door. He waited.

The man with the gun device holstered it and then placed the palm of his hand flat against the steel of the door, softly. He pushed with the slightest of pressure, and the door swung easily open, its hinges squeaking slightly.

The two quickly stepped across the threshold into the pitch-black hallway beyond the door. Two criss-crossing torch beams disappeared into the dark belly of the building.

The alarm began, a high drone. It carried through the quiet night. A dog began howling in response, followed by another. Slowly, lights began to flicker on in the occasional apartment down the street: someone peering suspiciously out of the window, only to think better of it. An elderly man with insomnia opened his door and craned his head to look towards the source of the droning alarm.

Nearly a minute after disappearing into the doorway, the two figures emerged from the dark interior of the building, the alarm still insistently wailing. Neither was carrying the box any more – it had been left inside.

When later questioned by the Angel City Police Department, the only thing the sole witness – a paralegal who had come downstairs to stretch his legs and get some fresh air – could say for certain about the events was that he had seen two shapes moving across the street. The rest was unclear – he hadn’t been wearing his glasses, after all. Those had been sitting on his desk up on the fourth floor, where his entire team and an outside group of temp workers had been working late into the night to meet a deadline for the Angel lawyers. There were at least a hundred and thirty-five workers on the floor. The overtime pay was good, the witness explained tearfully.

Quickly scanning the street to check if it was clear, the two dark figures moved at a trot down the pavement towards a residential neighbourhood. Reaching the corner of the dark residential street, they went separate ways without a word, one turning right towards Beverly, the other going left towards Melrose.

The street was once again abandoned, the alarm wailing over an empty scene.

A security guard who had been drowsing in his old silver Toyota Corolla finally woke to the noise of the alarm. Sputtering and muttering, the overweight guard drew himself up out of the reclined driver’s seat and opened the car door.

“Goddammit,” he cursed under his breath as he collected himself. How long had he been napping? It couldn’t have been that long. But now the alarm was going off – this could mean his job. Scanning the street, everything seemed normal except for the alarm. He fumbled for his long torch and flipped it on. Stepping down the pavement, he walked under the towering glass façade of the building. He reached the glass front doors and checked them. They were still locked snugly tight. The guard’s brow cinched in concentration. He shined the light slowly inside the glass of the doors, its beam moving back and forth across the lobby, but he could see no movement.

He felt at his waistband but couldn’t find the keycard for the side door into the lobby. Must have left it in the car. So, reaching to his waist, he pulled up a huge steel ring that had at least two dozen keys attached to it. Narrowing his eyes, the guard began going through the keys. He tried one, and then another, but none of them fitted. Exasperated, he continued looking through the keys for the right one, then thought better of it.

Dropping the ring back to his side, he started stepping carefully through the short, manicured bushes that edged the front of the building, shining his light through the glass inside. The beam shone weirdly into the dark, empty building, reflecting off the shiny floor of the minimalist lobby, casting fractured, monumental shadows.

&nbs

p; Suddenly the searching beam found something out of place, only a metre inside the glass wall.

“What the hell?” the guard muttered to himself, looking at the black metal box through the glass. Scratching his head, the guard walked back to the front doors. He pulled the huge ring of keys from his pocket and began searching for the right one. He tried one. Not right. He cursed. Tried another. This one didn’t fit either.

The legal workers from the fourth floor started emerging from the stairwell into the dark lobby, which was illuminated by flashing alarm lights. Bleary-eyed from too much work and too little sleep, they stumbled into the lobby, grumbling, dozens of them.

“Must be another false alarm,” a man with a stained white shirt and a brown tie complained under his breath. “Should have just stayed upstairs with Phil and the others.”

Many of the office workers just stood in the lobby, yawning, waiting for the alarm to be reset, looking at the vending machines. There’d been two false alarms in the past month. Some of the workers had begun exiting the building through the side door with their keycards to get a bit of fresh air before heading back up to their late shift. They stood outside, just feet away from the sheer glass walls of the building, the ANGEL ADMINISTRATION AFFAIRS lettering just above their heads.

The alarm continued to drone.

Then, in a panic, the security guard began yelling at the workers, rushing towards them with his torch.

“Move! Move! Get away!” the guard shouted. “For God’s sake, mo— ”

Before he could finish his sentence, he was incinerated in a hellish firestorm of flame and glass.