‘They won’t think we’re crazy?’ Si asked with a fleeting glance at Jial over his shoulder. ‘They’ll know about the beasts?’
‘Everyone knows about the chiasmus. Don’t worry.’
‘Everyone?’ Chrissy responded bitterly. ‘We didn’t!’
‘Okay, every adult – why do you think your parents were so well armed, so well protected with metal shutters on their houses?’
‘Sure, and a fat lot of good that did us Jial!’ Si spat back.
‘It was such a large attack, so many of them all at once; they weren’t prepared for that.’
‘Where’d they all come from, just like that?’ Si demanded to know. ‘How come these chiasmus or whatever you call them have never even appeared in books, in movies?’
‘And what would be the point of that, Si? It would just scare children for no reason. We thought the presence of the angels would prevent it happening again – but, as you know, something’s happening to us too. We’re…were still vanishing too. And I can’t explain why.’
‘You can’t explain, or you won’t explain?’ Chrissy asked vehemently, even though she couldn’t fail to notice that Jial seemed upset, even incredibly apprehensive, about the continuing disappearance of the angels.
‘And did I hear you say again?’ Si frowned angrily. ‘This has happened before?’
‘Frequently, I’m afraid. These chiasmus are an evolutionary throwback; actually a branch of humanity, would you believe? One that’s managed to cling on living hidden amongst us, gradually growing in strength.’
Chrissy felt more confused and lost than ever, despite Jial’s supposed explanation. Exhausted, all she wanted to do at the moment was sleep. She couldn’t hold back from deeply yawning.
Jial yawned along with her.
‘Jial? You yawned! You did yawn the last time I said you had!’
This was now the second time Chrissy had seen Jial yawn.
Angels weren’t supposed to tire. They were supposed to keep a constant watch over you. That’s what everyone said and what everyone was told about angels.
‘I did not yawn!’ Jial protested. ‘I was just, you know, sort of sighing. That’s all.’
‘It looked like a yawn to me!’
‘If you’re tired, Chrissy, get some sleep,’ Si said, yawning tiredly himself. ‘This is a military vehicle, so there’s probably some blankets somewhere.’
‘I reckon you’ve left the beasts behind.’
Jial realised she didn’t need to add that the beasts had only stopped chasing them because they’d stopped to kill and cause mayhem back in the trailer park.
‘You could take turns driving and sleeping. There’ll be rations somewhere around here too, if you’re hungry. And plenty of petrol in the jerry cans.’
‘It can’t be much farther, surely?’
Si checked the google map on his mobile. He also punched a few buttons, grimacing in frustration when it dawned on him that there was still no telephone service.
Jial chuckled bitterly.
‘This far out of town, Si, that map’s useless. It’s going to be a lot farther than you think, farther than you remember it being when you last came out here.’ Jial pointed to the compass fixed to the jeep’s dashboard. ‘No matter what happens, keep heading in the same direction. The road’s going to run out pretty soon, so you’ll be driving for at least thirty miles across empty desert.’
‘Empty desert? For thirty miles? Jial, just what is going on?’
‘Sorry, Chrissy; I’ve probably already told you more than I should have. And now I’ve got to leave you for a little while.’
‘Leave? Jial you can’t lea–’
‘Sorry, I have to. But I’ll be back before your reach town, honest. Oh, by the way, Bonniville won’t be as you remember it. It’ll be – how should I say it? – a lot more futuristic than you’re expecting.’
‘Jial, what do you mean – futuristic?’
Jial shrugged, grinned wanly.
‘Oh and when we’re there, don’t mention me, okay? Don’t mention angels.’
‘Don’t mention angels? What do–’
But Chrissy’s query came too late. Jial had vanished once more.
*
Chapter 36
The sun was rising at last. Through a rippling haze of rising heat and vaporised dew, Chrissy could make out the pulsating images of the edge of town.
As Jial had warned, the road they had been driving along had petered out ages ago. Thankfully, the well-sprung, four-wheel-drive jeep was more than capable of taking in its stride the rocky ground that had replaced it. In fact, when Chrissy had taken over the wheel to give Si a chance to take a rest, she had been pleasantly surprised to find just how much easier the automatic jeep was to drive than the stick-shift van.
As in parts of Hermon, a narrow road ran around the edge of the town, perpendicular to the surrounding desert. Drawing nearer to it, and preparing to drive up and turn on to it, Chrissy gave the sleeping Si a nudge.
‘Si? We’re here.’
Si stirred beneath the thick blanket he’d covered himself in, an attempt to gain as much warmth and comfort as he could while remaining seated in the jeep’s passenger seat. Behind him, in the rear seat, Jial abruptly appeared with a jovial, ‘Hi everyone; glad you all got some sleep.’
The jeep lurched slightly as it bounced onto the road. It purred in delight, however, as it gently curved across the smooth tarmac of the road.
‘Jial!’ Chrissy shouted over her shoulder irately. ‘There’s still a lot you need to–’
She stopped in midsentence as Si reached out a hand to interrupt her, to draw her attention back to her surroundings.
‘Chrissy, something’s not right here! Not right at all.’
‘Sure, sure, it’s not the Bonniville I remember, as Jial had warned us–’
Her voice faded away as she took in the wrecked cars. Cars not just abandoned by the kerbs, but also chaotically strewn across the road.
As Jial had also warned, the cars weren’t of the type either Chrissy or Si were used to. They were sleeker, and seemingly made more of glass than metal. Glass that had been shattered, violently smashed.
Apart from the sound of their own jeep, and its hollow echo reverberating through the alleys separating the nearby buildings, the town was eerily quiet.
The town appeared abandoned.
‘Oh no no!’ Jial breathed in horror. ‘Not here too!’
*
Chapter 37
‘That could explain why Hermon isn’t getting any help from this direction. And why you’ve been getting fewer supplies delivered recently.’
Jial looked out miserably across the deserted, partially demolished town. Everywhere seemed abandoned, wrecked.
‘You mean to say even you didn’t know anything about this?’ Chrissy said accusingly.
‘Do I need to point out that things aren’t going too well for us angels at the moment either, Chrissy?’ Jial replied irritably. Gruffly crossing her arms, she slunk back into the rear seat.
Spotting what looked like some form of large garage situated along the side of the road, Chrissy smartly and confidently swung the jeep towards it.
‘Seeing as how even our angels seem to have lost the plot about what’s going on around here, we’ll see if this town’s newspapers and magazines can give us any clues.’
Pulling into the drive, Chrissy immediately realised that this wasn’t the kind of gas station she was used to. Yes, there were cars parked alongside what could have been tall pumps, but the dispensers weren’t like anything she’d seen back in Hermon. A few of them were seriously damaged, even impossibly twisted out of shape, as were all of the parked cars.
Even stranger, none of the signs and advertising posters she could see scattered around the forecourt were in English. They weren’t even in a language she could recognise. The lettering was a strange, flowing script, a series of elegantly curving lines and dots that reminded her more of so
me form of Arabic writing.
‘Now that, that’s really odd,’ Jial observed in a tone of undisguised bewilderment from the jeep’s rear. She’d also noticed the same strangely alien-looking posters. ‘Even I wasn’t expecting that!’
‘This is all getting more worrying by the minute, Jial; all these things taking you by surprise.’ Si spun around slightly in his seat to glare at Jial. ‘Where are we?’
‘Well, not America, like you’d thought, obviously,’ Jial said matter-of-factly. She was trying to stare deep inside the garage’s shop as Chrissy pulled up outside. ‘And like I’d thought too, for that matter.’
‘You kidding me?’ Si exclaimed furiously. ‘Are you seriously trying to say we’ve somehow ended up in some other country just because we’ve driven across a desert?’
Jial shook her head, yet she looked to be every bit as confused as Si and Chrissy.
‘No, no; I mean, it seems even Hermon can’t be in America. Even though I’d also been led to believe it was.’
*
They all slipped out of the jeep. They headed to the shop’s huge, broken plate-glass door.
‘Aren’t angels all-seeing?’ Chrissy no longer seemed irate, just bewildered. ‘Surely you’d know, at the very least, if we were in America or not?’
‘Hmn, it seems angels aren’t as all-knowing as we’d like to think we are. Might I suggest we also look for a map, see if that could give us some idea of–’
Towards the rear of the shop, where a shattered door led out to a storeroom, there came the sound of something knocked and falling. The sound of something scuffling.
‘A rat?’ Si whispered hopefully.
They were all wide eyed with fear, all frozen still, so as not to make any noise. They glanced back towards the shop’s door, wondering if they would have time to run back to the jeep.
Chrissy sensed how empty her hands suddenly felt, cursing her stupidity for leaving her gun behind.
Slowly, they began to back towards the door.
‘This could be the part in the movie where we find some petrified kid hiding out from–’
Si’s whispers were cut off by another sound of scuffling, this time coming from behind them.
They whirled around; and all gasped in terror, even Jial.
A chiasmus was standing in the shop’s splintered doorway.
*
Chapter 38
They had no choice but to run for the back door: the door leading to the storeroom, where they had first heard sounds of scrabbling and movement.
Each one of them was hoping that, as Si had said only moments before, it might be nothing more than a rat or some other creature.
The chiasmus bounded after them, effortlessly shrugging aside the shop’s heavily loaded shelves, scattering rotting goods across the floor.
The storeroom was much like the shop’s front, only with more heavily stacked shelves. They rushed down the narrow aisles running between these shelves. Off to one side, towards a far wall of the large room, they all heard the growl of another scavenging chiasmus.
Hearing the fleeing Si and Chrissy, the chiasmus elatedly threw aside the packs of grain he’d been eating. As if the shelves and stores were ridiculously fragile and weightless, he began to smash his way through everything in his way in his eagerness to get towards them.
‘Another door, a door out to the back!’ Jial screamed, pointing towards yet another shattered door, but this time one leading to the backyard.
Behind them, the cacophony of angry howls and splintering, toppling shelves increased as the other chiasmus rushed in from the shop. Even though he had to duck to clear the doorway, he charged in without even briefly breaking his pace.
Moving swiftly and lightly with the use of her wings, Jial was the first out of the back door. She wanted to make sure that Chrissy and Si wouldn’t be blindly rushing out into more chiasmus. She quickly glanced about her, checking that the way back to the jeep out on the forecourt was clear. It was – until another beast loped around the building’s corner, heading towards the exit door.
Chrissy and Si hurtled through the doorway. Jial spun around on her feet, directing them away from this new, swiftly oncoming chiasmus.
‘Quick, quick! The other way!’ she yelled. ‘They’re coming this way!’
Turning sharply, Chrissy and Si sprinted towards the partially demolished remains of a huge carwash. The carwash’s vast sheets of plasti-glass were mainly broken, the massive rainbow coloured rollers scattered as if nothing more than a discarded set of hand brushes.
‘Jial, can’t you call up the angels?’ Chrissy pleaded breathlessly.
‘I can’t, I can’t. They won’t work here!’
Hopping through the shattered glass on their side of the carwash, and finding themselves confronted by a solid brick wall directly in front of them, they looked towards what would have been the entrance. But it was blocked by a skewed, crumpled van. The exit was hardly better, with two cars almost melded into each other, they were so twisted and warped out of shape.
Behind them, they could hear the heavy tread of the three beasts charging across the yard towards them. Si dived towards the slender, jagged corridors of space winding between the partially enjoined cars, looking for the best way through them.
The cars gave a metallic screech, slithering across each other a little. Si gasped in surprise as the tunnel he was hoping to clamber through widened.
A fourth chiasmus appeared at the far end of the tunnel, effortlessly lifting one of the cars aside.
‘Trapped!’ Si gasped worriedly, sliding to a halt, nervously reaching for Chrissy’s hand.
He turned towards her.
‘This might be a bit late to tell you, but I wanted you to know, before we – I love you!’
He leant towards her, urgently closing his lips on hers.
Chrissy felt ridiculously warm, strangely happy, angry, frightened, and, most weirdly of all, somehow free, released.
They were going to die – and she accepted that.
She would die with the one she loved.
*
Chapter 39
What an awful, awful dream.
As she finally, hesitatingly woke up, Chrissy drowsily shook her head. She hoped it would somehow shake out of her mind the last remnants of the terrible nightmare she’d suffered.
She still felt half-asleep, not fully awake yet. Her vision was still blurred. She couldn’t quite rid herself of a sense of unfamiliarity, of a hard to shift stupor.
Her bed felt surprisingly hard, cold and unrelenting. She was uncomfortable, laid oddly, ungainly. Sharp objects, like shattered stones, probed mercilessly into her flesh.
She blinked, partially shook off her daze.
She was lying on the floor, not her bed. A concrete floor, littered with debris, with small shards of glass, of metal.
Slowly, unsurely, she brought a hand up to her face.
It was bloodied, such that no clear flesh was visible.
With a start, she glanced down at the rest of her body. It, too, was drenched in blood. And she was naked, apart from a few odd shreds of clothing that hung from her like long, bloody clots.
She sat up, swiftly wrapping her arms about herself as her whole body trembled with a terrified, embarrassed shiver.
How had she ended up here like this?
She urgently tried to piece together the last parts of her nightmare in the hope of working out what had really happened to her.
But no, it wasn’t a nightmare was it?
As she began to rapidly recall the terrible events that had led to her ending up naked and bloodied on this concrete floor, it dawned on her that everything had really happened.
They had been attacked by the chiasmus.
She had somehow survived.
Si!
Dreading what she might see, she urgently glanced everywhere about her,
Si was seated against the wall, thankfully seemingly uninjured. His face was tightly
drawn, however, his eyes wide with shock and terror. Jial was kneeling by him, carefully tending him as if he were suffering from hidden injuries, reassuring him with quiet yet obviously caring words.
Why isn’t Jial helping me? Chrissy wondered resentfully, enviously. Look at me! I’m far more injured than he is!
It was a crazy thing to think under the circumstances, she knew. It was a last residue of anger that, mercifully, was gradually ebbing, and somewhat unhurriedly flowing out of her.
With a jolt, Chrissy realised that Si’s terror-stricken eyes were locked on her.
She was naked!
She’d forgotten she was naked!
Wrapping her arms even tighter about herself, and running in a demure, half crouch, Chrissy ducked behind the remains of one of the broken roller brushes.
Even though she’d intended to keep her eyes only on Si, her change of position gave her an entirely different view of the carwash. For the first time, she saw that there were other bodies scattered throughout the tightly enclosed area of the wash.
And not chiasmus bodies either; human bodies. Bloodied, shattered, human bodies.
One was skewered on the end bar of one of the massive roller brushes, the blood of the dead woman merging with the florescent whites, pinks and purples of the nylon strands. Another had been smashed and pinioned against the sharp, twisted shards of the wrecked cars. A third body had been shredded amongst the slivers of glass. Little was left of a fourth, other than pieces of flesh, muscle and bone strewn across the floor, as if brutally butchered by a maniac.
‘Who…who did this?’ Chrissy fretfully asked Jial. She was at once both awed and alarmed by the sudden realisation that all of this mayhem, this hideous brutality, could only have been achieved by a creature of phenomenal strength. ‘And Si – is he okay? Is he injured?’
Jial looked up from tending Si; and Chrissy saw in her eyes the same fear and shock she’d seen in Si’s eyes.
‘He’s fine, Chrissy: shocked, scared, that’s all. He’s not injured – thanks to you.’
‘Thanks…thanks to me?’ Chrissy gulped in disbelief.