In the future, it’s the 90’s. The Neo 90’s. A calamity struck Earth, and all digital media not stored on physical mediums was lost. Humanity’s pop-culture was rolled back a millennium. Implausible? What-ever. Anyway, got it?
Gemma cried quietly, when she even bothered to at all. The idea of living so much longer in the state that she was, being annoyed by her stepfather, just seemed like total bullshit. She hated living in a trailer on Mars. The Red Planet was like the crappy version of Earth, where all the yokels lived. She adored her neighbors, saints as they were, who deserved a better rap than was delivered upon them via notoriety, but not even they, in their immaculate benevolence, could not compensate for the illustrious abuse bestowed upon her by her mother’s chosen benefactor, Carl.
She would lay within her bedroom every night, staring up through the hole in the ceiling of her bedroom, and just want. She didn’t wish for riches or golden trinkets. All she wanted for was some sense of reason from reality. There was nothing to strive for, but the place where one could strive. Her family was poor. Her mother an invalid–she had been subjected to so much Cell Phone radiation as a youth that it hampered her ability to cognate thoughts. She spent her days sitting in front of the television, drooling from one corner of her mouth or the other.
Her mom’s life was Presbylutheran Ministries. She sent all the money she could to them. The idea of that made Gemma sick to her stomach. She wanted for things she could not afford, meanwhile her mother mailed away her lifeblood to religious ministries. So, in turn, as she grew, Gemma had learned to hate the Ministries, if not her mother. She pitied the woman, being too unintelligent to provide. So instead she had sent money away to those who foresaw that ability, but who also had lied.
But one such as Gemma could not afford hatred. It was an extravagance beyond her means. There was too little time to process hate when every day you had to work for cash to feed your derelict mother for fear she’d die in her sleep from withdrawals from the narcotics she had been addicted to long before you were even an idea in the world. Unhappiness was not even a calculation in her life, for Gemma. One had to have a life in order to be unhappy with it. And for her, there was no basic calculation of existence for which to qualify as even having been.
Wearing her shiny red backpack, Gemma walked down the dusty road to the blacktop that led to the old arcade she worked at, earning five-dollars an hour. The owner was a pervert, who annoyed her. But nonetheless she strived on, working towards some faroff, foregone tomorrow that may never manifest. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t the world she abided in.
Her boss was from Armenia, and from what she knew of him, he was very much a stalwart. He did not accept anything he did not believe in, and she suspected his was either a very unacceptable take on Armenian men, or a demonstration of the incredible difference between him and them. Either way, however she processed his behavior around her, she chose not to examine it to its fullest extent. She knew he was what he was, but he gave her money. And she tolerated his bullshit.
The dirt road to work sucked. She saw cats that would never let her pet them. It was lame. Just perfectly good cats. She heard the crumbling of gravel beneath tires, and looked behind her to see Andreas, in her Honda Civic. She had known Andreas for over a decade, from elementary school to present, under another name. But that person had died, and given rise to her current acquaintance.
The small blue car pulled up next to the pedestrian. It’s driver offered her a ride.
Gemma was annoyed, if anything. Since Andreas had turned out to be a girl, she was even more of a ribald than before. If she had hit on women in the past, with abandon, she did so now with a tendency towards self-harm.
Gemma cut the driver off before she could hit on her, “Shut the fuck up before you start, fucko. Yeah, yeah, I know. No ‘fuck’ no ‘ride’. You’re trash.”
Andreas felt hurt. She let Gemma know by saying exactly that.
“I’m hurt,” she said.
Gemma rolled her eyes. “Go away. I don’t need a ride to work because it’s two blocks.”
“I saw that cat of yours who ran away. ‘Eldridge,’ you called him? Stupid animal. I wanted to scoop him up and roll over to your place and be like, ‘I found your cat,’ but the little sumbitch was fast.”
She shrugged.
“Who names their cat ‘Eldridge?’”
“I do. Fuck off.”
“Okay then,” Andreas said and accelerated her car. She moved to the top of the hill, in the vehicle, and turned right.
Gemma had gotten a cat from her aunt, who was crazy. Her crazy aunt Linda had been institutionalized and so Gemma had apparently inherited her cat. She had called him ‘Jack,’ but to Gemma that name was garbage. It had to have a cool name, based on something she liked. So she renamed him.
She had no idea how Eldridge had escaped their trailer home, but he had. He just bamf’d through the wall one day, and there was nothing she could do about it. She first noticed on the day she had a boy over from school, who was into her. Turns out all he wanted was to suck on her feet and that was charming at first, but quickly turned weird.
She was only seventeen and had already had some fucker slobber on her toes. Is this what all that really was? Approval, at the cost of bullshit? Whatever.
At least that guy had moved between junior and senior year. Creep.
She got to the top of the hill and had to wait for cars to stop driving like fast assholes long enough for her to cross the highway.
Her work was a tiny white cinderblock building, whose dimensions were divided between a laundromat and a tiny arcade.
They kept having different games brought in, because she’d beat them before her boss would, and that drove him nuts. Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom? She beat it first. Virtua Fighter? She beat it first, too. Ehrgeiz? She beat it. Her boss hated her. But she basically ran his shit. What was he gonna do, fire her? She had a job for life, as long as she was willing to put up with a Generation X weirdo huffing on her paint fumes all the time, so to speak.
Twenty-nine ninety-seven sucked, and she was all the way there to appreciate it.
What was Gemma’s deal, anyway? Andreas didn’t have time for that drama. This was the Neo Nineties. She had other shit to do, and none of it had anything to do with Gemma’s trifling ass. She pushed the pedal up to eighty in a sixty, and made the trip to town in only five minutes. She had been driving it for almost a year, nearly every day, and by that point could handle it in her sleep.
Andreas hit a stop sign, and for the two seconds she was stopped there, she saw a boy she knew beating up some random guy in an alley. She laughed out loud, wondered what the hell that was about, but kept on driving.
She found that there was very little traffic for a Saturday, on which there was normally not much anyway. Andreas slowed her car as she got into town, as there were just too many cars parked by the roadsides to safely dark around. There was also the local cop, Officer Fuckface, who had a penchant for being mean to girls.
She pulled up to parallel park, but when she was backing up, she almost ran right into somebody who’d just walked out into the street. People were coming outside of nearby buildings, too.
All around her people were coming outside. She looked around, and that was when she saw their hair. She was shocked to find that it was affecting her, also.
Quinton hit the man in the face until he stopped trying to hit him back. Satisfied that the guy who’d tried to rob him wore a sufficiently ugly mug from punching, he grabbed him by the hair and jerked him forward onto his face. He pulled the mugger’s wallet out of his back pocket, and opened it up to find a bunch of single dollar bills. He took them and hit the man in the head with the leather billfold.
“Bet that was a plot-twist, eh, asshole?”
That was the first time he was attempted to be robbed by a drifter. That didn’t turn out so well for the bad guy. Everybody in town knew not to mess with him. That’s why he assumed the man hadn’t been a local.
He may only have been fifteen-years old, but Quinton was a badass. He didn’t play sports, he hung out in the woods and built traps, he listened to Industrial music, and he bussed tables at a truck stop after school. During the summer, however, he worked there full-time.
Quinton stuffed the money into the pocket of his green camo pants and jogged out the alleyway like nothing was going. He stopped after a block because there were people outside everywhere, just standing around.
He needed glasses, but he didn’t want to bother with them, so he squinted to see what seemed odd about everybody. A woman came out of a nearby building. She was about sixty, dressed in pastels, and she had crazy hair. It was standing up in all directions, like she was a cartoon character getting a shock.
She saw him, and with a horrified expression, stayed on her porch. She had apparently been wandering outside in wonder until running into one of society’s derelicts. He just kept on walking.
Sadler was watching his little brother and sister in the park when he noticed that the hair on his arms had begun standing up. Just standing up. He was wowed by it, and went to go show his siblings, but found that all the hair on their heads was spreading out, like from static electricity. It was like when you rubbed a balloon against your hair, but there were none there.
The air smelled like something not-quite unfamiliar. It made his nose hairs tingle. It reminded him of new electronics.
Everywhere, people were coming outside into the streets, agog at the phenomenon that was apparently being experienced by everyone inhabiting the area. He put his hand on a piece of playground equipment and received an electric shock, startling him.
He told his kid brother and sister that it was time to go home.
They complained to him, but he was insistent. He dusted the sand off of their clothes and shoes, and loaded them up into his parent’s old black pickup truck they allowed him to drive as his first car.
It went without thought that he wanted no part of these unforeseen circumstances, but also he just didn’t want to run the risk of facing any kind of accusation by his father. He was a strict, but sincere man.
Busby was still wet from standing outside in the rain all night across the street from his crush’s bedroom window, despite his yellow raincoat. He just wanted one look at her. Maybe she’d have just noticed him. Misty. She was athletic, but not a scary volleyball girl like Gemma was. Misty was in the drama club, and Busby had joined to be near her. He appreciated how everybody tolerated his crush as long as he respected boundaries. Though it appears there was some degree of debate about that. He didn’t care. He was just a boy in love. Or something.
Rain only fell on schedule, and on specific locations, on Mars. Climatrol system. Everybody knew that. Busby didn’t care.
When everything opened in town that morning, he walked into the square and spent his last dollars on donuts and coffee. The town cop, Officer Fuckface, grilled him on why he was out so early. He had lied and said he had a paper route.
The cop didn’t really give a shit. Well, he literally did actually. He had to take a shit, he said, and that Busby had been lucky or he’d have checked in on him.
Busby was just lucky like that.
When the comic shop opened at ten, he would have a place to hang out. So he decided to just chill in the park until then. That would only be a few hours.
He had a thought, after waiting a while. He should practice martial arts while waiting there, because it was a wide open space full of onlookers. They could see how awesome he looked. He had a brown belt in Martian Karate.
Busby thought people were reacting to him at first. Then he realized they were, just not for the reason he first believed. He reacted to them in the same way. Everybody’s hair was standing straight up.
Gemma’s boss wasn’t there today, but his wife was. She was also from Armenia, on Earth, and was the most delightful person to be around. Gemma adored Aghavni, which she had been told meant, ‘dove.’ Sometimes, Aghavni would let Gemma drive the car on errands for the Mat.
She was closing the top of one of the thousand-year-old arcade cabinets after fixing up the ancient joystick’s sensitivity, when Aghavni came over from the laundromat side holding her car keys and a piece of paper. Gemma excitedly began putting up her tools.
Though not licensed, she did have her learner’s permit. Aghavani seemed to just enjoy hanging out with the younger woman.
“So what are you going to do tonight, Gemma?”
“I dunno. Go home, eat an entire pizza, and drink cans of pepsi until I fall asleep watching Sailor Moon? You?”
“I thought I might divorce Gor. I don’t know.”
Aghavani almost always talked about divorcing her husband.
The trip into town from work went by fast. They went past the entrance to the trailer park, and by the white block houses. Then past the field. Up the hill, and across the intersection with the interstate, where there was a video store across from the truck stop, Tri-County. Beyond more homes was the highschool, and then the Palisades. The town of East Pacific started officially there.
She turned right three lights past the highschool, by the taco joint, where the tiny city’s oldest quarter was. The town square. Traffic was terrible.
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“So have you been winning the volleyballs?”
Gemma confirmed this. Boy had she been. During the school year she played for the team, but during summer vacation she hooked up with sand VB players out at the Dunes of Oasis, a sports club. Gemme held the singular distinction of having been the only player at the Dunes to break two noses in one game.
“I could focus a lot more on the game if I didn’t have to go to school.”
“Oh no, Gemma, we talked about this. You can’t drop out and expect us to just give you a job. It’s bad form.”
“So if I quit school, you’re just gonna fire me?”
Aghavani laughed, “Yes, I will fire you.” She pointed her finger at her like a gun, jokingly.
Gemma didn’t know if she was serious or not. But she laughed too.
“Oh my god, Gemma, your hair.”
Gemma looked at her boss’ wife. Her hair had begun to move around as if under the effects of static electricity.
“Oh, Gemma. The doctor on TV said that this is a sign of bad health.”
Gemma saw a man in a nearby car with hair also risen to the roof of his car. She touched her own head, confirming some suspicions.
“What, electric hair? You have it too.”
“Oh, I do? Oh no!”
The woman flipped down the vanity mirror and laughed at the affront of whatever cosmic anomaly was causing the change. The distinction in question turned out to be just a lot of people standing in the damn road. With fuzzy hair.
They were all walking around, disturbing the public order. It took barely anything to shut down society, it seemed. One minute everything was normal, the next minute something was up with everybody’s hair, and all of the sudden it was time to block traffic. Just like people.
Andraeus was in her parked car, out in front of the hardware store her father worked at. The owner was his old friend from highschool. The two spent all day talking about their Dungeons & Dragons days while stocking and selling tools. Her dad loved three things: the Forgotten Realms D&D setting, tools, and then his family.
Her dad’s boss, Raph, greeted her upon entering his tightly packed little store. He was like, “Ah, how does our fourth-level Fighter fare?”
Andreaus said, “feels like fourth level.”
He commented, “You’ll level up. Give it time.”
She rolled her eyes.
Despite how her father had been disappointed at her utter dismissal of Ed Greenwood’s fantasy campaign setting, he was still happy as fuck to see her show up with his lunch. Her dad, a big dude with dark hair, was helping a customer figure out wing nuts. Andreaus handed her a styrofoam container in a plastic bag and said, “Here you go, dukes.”
“Thank you, sweetie. I appreciate it. Mmm. Tacos. And meatloaf? What did I do to deserve this?”
He hugged her deeply and told her he loved her. If her dad was good for one thing, it was hug proliferation.
“I love tacos. I love them well.”
Her dad was weird.
“Is Lady the Slayer gonna show up to tonight’s game, sweetie?”
Andreaus sighed, “yes, dad.”
“You’re almost fifth level. That’s when AD&D stops being hard.”
“So you keep saying.”
She gave him a cursory squish and went on her way.
This was the dorkiest hardware store ever, surely.
Quinton lived in the Palisades–tract housing. Low-income two and three bedroom box-like homes. Arguably a step above the trailer park, to those who tracked that bullshit. Quinton didn’t. But the disparity he suffered over it sometimes did. So what if none of his shirts had sleeves? It wasn’t because he was too poor to afford them. It was because he cut them off because he had bitching guns.
It was an easy walk to and from school, and no more difficult to get to town. He thought he might want to figure out what was going on with everybody’s hair standing up.
He heard the whorp-whorp sound made when a cop just switched the sirens of their car on and then off again immediately. It was a sound he knew well. How had Officer Fuckface snuck up on him?
The aforementioned dickface cop was parked right at the city limits, down the block, around a curve. If one looked through the trees, he was just barely visible.
“Fuck.” He thought about running, but decided he was too smart for that shit.
The officer literally shouted at Quinton to come here.
He did, feeling the urgency of his being commanded to do so and lifted his feet.
“You been fighting, boy?” Said Officer Fuckface.
Quinton said nothing.
The bigger man seized the smaller boy’s hand and took a look at the redness present on his knuckles.
He said, “Thought so. You little bastard. Back to that same old shit again? There’s a father of two in the back of an ambulance over that hill who wants to press charges.”
The officer reacted to something he saw on Quinton. It must have been his hair standing up. It was getting wider.
Quinton looked up and saw the Officer’s mustache was standing up like crazy all of the sudden. He’d intentionally been walking beyond the reach of the strange phenomenon, in this instance west. It was catching up with him. Rather, it was just spreading.
Officer Fuckface sneezed as the hairs from his stache rose and stood up into his nose. Quinton socked him in the balls as hard as he could and just ran west. He knew just where to hide. Nobody would be seeing him for a while.
Sadler’s father and mother were very pleased by how instead of staying and observing what was going on in town, he had returned immediately. At times his father’s chiropractor hands could be supremely gentle. But on the other end of things, nobody knew how to beat a child like a doctor of chiropractic. For them, they had practice.
When his father had finished his appraisal of Sadler’s actions, he left the kitchen to pursue other things. His mother had her “sister” over, and the two of them picked him for every detail of what it was like. They were watching it on the news.
On TV, a television reporter was standing in the town square where he’d just been earlier that morning. The electrical events had apparently escalated, and now on top of everything else, automobiles had apparently stopped working.
His mom chirped with surprise and pointed at the screen, “Look, it’s your little friend, Sadler, Beebsby.”
He said, “Busby?” And checked it out.
Sure enough, there was Busby. Standing around like a doof in deadpan, just barely cutoff the right side of the screen, amid a number of onlookers.
Busby saw two men walking through the park dressed in hazmat suits, but they were just holding the headgear under their arms. They were within earshot of the water fountain, he wagered. He broke off from the gawking throng and got himself a sip of water. He overheard the men talking about possible Climatrol anomalies.
He looked down at his watch and realized that it had stopped at some point. He wondered if the comic shop was open? He had stuff to talk about.
The owner of the shop, and his wife, were always there together during business hours. They never hired any help, because the two of them seemed to be able to handle everything well enough by themselves.
They stopped having their D&D games there after Andreaus had gotten a weird vibe from the owner-couple. Said they were ‘unicorn-hunting weirdos.’ He didn’t know what that meant, nor half of what his lady friend in games said. Her dad ran a great game, though.
“Hey, Bubs,” said the male owner. Kind of a cheesy looking middle-aged guy. He claimed to have a PhD in Rob-Liefeld-ology. He was also deeply invested in conspiracies. He seemed to strive for every radical opinion he could maintain.
His wife just stayed high all the time. Like, ALL the time.
The lady owner came in from the back wearing a porkpie hat to keep her hair from standing on end. Busby had been using the hood of his yellow raincoat. The owner’s hair was bald on top, and braided in the back, so his effect has the least of all.
“Trippy day, huh guys?” She asked them rhetorically.
“I think this is those Science guys again. Unscheduled rainfall across the planet? Strange quake phenomenon in the South? What’s going on here is gonna get swept up under the rug. You watch.”
Busby said, “Hey, bro, but I was like on the news this morning.”
He asked the younger guy if he’d seen any government science types.
Busby had.
The owner turned pale.
“Are you for real?”
“I actually came here to mention that to you. They said it was a Climatrol malfunction.”
The owner hopped the counter and snuck up to the front window. From between posters of 2000 AD and Ninja High School he peaked out at the crowd.
“Any one of these guys could be a spook. Somebody is planning this? What is it? Are they scanning us? Trying to make us all sterile? Honey, we need to hike out to the farm.”
She wasn’t paying attention, she was reading manga now. She said, “What?”
He pointed at some weird looking dude standing in the middle of the street. His wild white hair looked as if it had already been standing straight up. He wore a white lab coat and jet black sunglasses with round specs. Unlike everyone else, he was standing perfectly still, and he was looking straight up.
The owner of the comic shop turned to look at Busby and said, with shifting eyes, “like, who is that, and what’s his deal?”
“Yo, what’s that guys deal?” Said Gemma.
Aghavani wasn’t paying attention. She was going through her purse to just give the girl with her the money to go and buy what they needed at the Mart.
“What sweetie?”
She pointed at the strange man who she didn’t know Busby had seen earlier.
He was just looking straight up.
She put on her sunglasses, walked right up next to him and looked straight up. At first she didn’t see anything, but after a second she did. She felt a chill run down her spine.
Something was looking at her. Right back at her, through the upper clouds. And it was fucking colossal.
Her legs nearly buckled from the sudden and immediate stress, and she almost pissed herself. Luckily she didn’t have to go, though. That may have been the only difference.
The man noticed her change, and said, “The Powers of Punishment. The Host of Heaven. Now that you’ve seen it, what do you think?” His voice was pointed and nerdy, but official and without bullshit.
“Honestly,” she thought about it for half a second, “It’s just something else on top of everything. Why is it here?”
“It is here because Mars is a Blasphemy, a corruption of His Will, as ordained. They fear what mankind might find within this planet.”
“I fucking hate god.”
“You just saw one of his angels. A Power.”
“What are you doing here, man?”
“I am here to watch the end of this civilization in penance for failing to stop its fall.”
She almost cried, but chose not to. “Can’t you do anything?”
“Oh, I can stop the attack it is gathering energy for. These things still have to abide by physics in this dimension. But they’d only send in their military and finish me that way.”
“Mars has a military, too. They’d fight them.”
He didn’t quite scoff, but the noise from his throat more or less accomplished the same effect.
“Do it, just please. I’m not ready.”
“If I Will, you must repay my Kindness.”
“Ew, pervert! I knew it!”
“You misunderstand.”
He withdrew from his pocket a chain of old fashioned skeleton keys. Each key looked like it was a different color than the former.
“You must agree to bear this key for me. Now and always, until the end of your life. And then your Soul will go to Hell. But you will no longer fear the Powers of Punishment, nor anything, for so long as you do live.”
“What the fuck, dude?”
“The attack is inbound. Look around you.”
Visible electricity could be seen now, and it was everywhere, riding across the surfaces of things, and arcing across space to others. Animals and people began screaming. That was when she noticed it was not affecting either of them. The dude’s hair literally just stood up anyway.
That was when Gemma realized that this man was not lying. He could stop it. He had to be able to.
“You had me at ‘going to Hell.’”
The atmosphere was intense. And not just from the static charge electrifying everything else around them.
“I hail Lord Satan. I, his servant, Doctor Faust, have one to sign a Covenant and Break A Seal. I bestow this key to her, a bearer for life, in your great name, Lord Satan. In return, bestow upon her the awesome strength of your original hubris. Let her defy the gods with your Sacred Defiance, Lord Satan. The Artes of Mars, the Forbidden Arms, the Eidolons!”
Gemma looked down at her hand to find she was holded a wicked, twisted and sinister, evil skeleton key. It was black at the core, but the metal of its make showed through a brazen blood red. The end of the thing looked razor sharp.
“Deflecting a plasma burst of this size is going to nearly kill me. It comes!”
From high up in the sky there came the sound of a thousand thunders. Everything turned pure white.
He said, “stay close.”
Doctor Faust traced a perfect circle on the ground around them. Where his fingertips made contact left illuminated energy. So encircled by the glowing sigil, he roared with a mixture of defiance and agony as the sky was split in half by the bolt of divine plasma.
It came down and Gemma closed her eyes and covered her ears with her hands. She felt it start to get hot and she could barely breathe, but then it cooled down suddenly, and everything around her popped as the atmosphere filled back in around her.
The tall doctor then crumpled into a pile.
He whispered, “they will come for me.”
Doctor Faust pointed to her chest.
“Defiance is in you. Open the Prison.” He then passed right the fuck out.
All around Gemma the world was still all there. Everything was strangely silent, because everything electrical had been totaled. People were laying around unconscious, she hoped.
The Doctor had kept his word. What did she even have to do? She admired the strange sharp key in her hand. She looked back down at the unconscious man. Who would come for him?
The skies were dense with clouds, and the atmosphere had been filled by fog as a result of the evaporation by the beam. She heard the flap of wings, like from a bird somewhere within the umbra. But it would have had to have been a big one. She saw a large white feather slowly circling down through the nebula above her. She caught it before it could hit the ground.
It was eighteen inches and pure white, and just perfect. She ran her thumb along the edge but then winced and let out a yelp as she realized it had slit her open. She felt something sting her arm, and saw that another feather had fallen near her, and sliced her. It was laying on the ground at her feet, dripping with blood.
They appeared to only be falling around her.
She began consciously avoiding them, as she dragged Doctor Faust under the awning of a nearby barbershop. No sooner had she pulled him up onto the bench out front, than she heard a loud thump.
Gemma looked over to where she’d just been, and saw a horrible sight. It was an angel. And it was sickening. Its torso was elongated, as were its arms and legs, like every segment of its humanoid body was of some equilateral proportionate length. Two segments from mid-torso, etc. Its neck was grotesquely long, and its head was tiny and round. Four long skinny wings, bearing the feathers from before, emerged from its back. Each of its arms ended with hands that were just four grasping multi jointed thumbs.
It saw her. Its ball head turned to face her, and she made ‘contact’ with its odd all black, big round eyeballs. The lower portion of its head split open in a wide yawning grin, bearing multiple rows of biting incisors. It released a deafening scream to try and make her flee. Instead, Gemma stood her ground.
Clutching the sharp key in her hand, she felt confident in a way she didn’t quite understand. She felt like in the back of her mind she was trying to figure something out. Like she wasn’t really in the situation that really happened at that moment.
Before her was a biblical territory, a heavenly monstrosity. It loped towards her, screeching like a banshee. She braced herself but was tackled through the window of the barbershop.
She felt shards of glass piercing her back. The hissing, wheezing angel bore down on her, creepily looming over her. It struck her with one of its wings suddenly, embedding at least nine feathers several inches into her exposed right arm and leg. She clenched her teeth and rolled over instinctively. Blood began to gush out of the wounds left behind as the feathers slid out of her.
Gemma rolled there in her own blood, dying herself red with it. But she refused to scream. On her front, she was struck again in the back. She began crawling away. The angel made a curious chirping noise. She heard it ruffle its wing feathers, as if reading them to finish her off. Instead, it reached out with one of its long pale arms and grabbed her by her blood soaked hair. It slammed her back on the ground with deadly force, intended to splatter her brains out. Familiar with taking falls, she put her volleyball skills to use and framed her elbows to take the impact. She’d save her skull, but realized she’d accidentally stabbed herself in the chest with the red key.
Gemma knew better than to try and remove something puncturing her, but this felt different. It didn’t hurt. It felt stable there, like it just fit. She touched the key and there was no pain.
She turned the key and there was a flash of fire in her mind.
The angel was about to fucking die.