Chapter Eight

(Angel)

Carin tensed under the sheets before relaxing into a contented spreadeagle, her heavy breathing filling the warm air of the cozy basement bedroom. Angel raised her face from between her wife's thighs and writhed up her body, sweat on sweat, until her head escaped the swelter of the sheets and she lay on top of her. Their eyes met, and in the nightstand's dim yellow lamplight, Carin's lavender pupils looked almost pink, making Angel think of an albino. Weird, but she could get used to that. They kissed, sharing that sour, salty taste, fresher now than it'd been in a long time.

Later, when they lay in each other's arms, Angel peeked over the side of the bed and noticed the bowl of fettuccine and chicken ragù half-spilled across the carpet. Oops. But there was plenty more where that came from. During the night Carin had consumed probably a week's worth of Italian dishes. That was when she wasn't sleeping or using the bathroom. Angel's elf had explained that her wife's metabolism had been accelerated to help deal with the millions of tiny alien machines working inside her to repair the damage that comes from having leukemia and being dead.

Aside from Carin's eyes, there were other things differences, things erased in the regeneration. Tiny golden freckles no longer peppered her nose and cheeks, and gone were the faint stress lines that had sprouted around her eyes over the last few months. The flowery vines tattooed along the back of her shoulders were mostly rubbed away, though on her forearm, the six black-inked words of poetry were still legible, if a little fogged.

These were insignificant things--and in the case of the wrinkles, nice things to lose--but they reminded Angel of the burned nightmare corpse Carin had been only yesterday afternoon. There were close calls, and there was being saved only by the elvish grace of bullshit science. Angel held Carin tighter and, despite the fact that civilization was collapsing around her, counted herself the luckiest woman in the world.

Above and far away came the faint roar of what sounded like thunder. There'd been a lot of that, lately. Angel ignored it. The scouting drones would warn her if danger drew close.

Carin's purple eyes stared at Angel fixedly. She tugged free a hand and touched a finger to Angel's cheek and slid it down her jawline. Angel playfully tried to bite it; Carin laughed and spoke. It was short and brief and, unlike the earlier, formless babbling, sounded like English. But she didn't use English words. Carin shook her head in frustration.

"Give it time, Baby," Angel said, rubbing a hand over Carin's smooth scalp. "My elf says all that language know-how is still up there in your egg, it's just scrambled is all."

Carin just stared at her, uncomprehending. Angel wondered what she sounded like to her. A grownup from the Charlie Brown cartoons? At least she was sort of recognizing faces now. But what did Carin think was going on?

She was smart, so she probably figured brain damage. But what did she make of waking up in an abandoned restaurant kitchen? Or Mack, who looked like he just stepped off the boat from Rivendell? Or how about Angel's Mighty Morphin' Power Armor? Her elf had told her that Carin likely didn't remember anything that happened at the hospital--short term memory would be the first to go--so she wouldn't even have that for context.

At least she wasn't freaking out anymore. It helped that she saw Angel was acting calm. That was important. Angel had to stay strong, let her know she was in control.

Carin leaned over to the nightstand and, carefully avoiding the security guard's handgun, snatched up Angel's smartphone. She lay back down into Angel's arms, and Angel watched over her shoulder as she navigated the photos until settling on one.

The picture was from back in March, during the pool party for Carin's twenty-ninth birthday. A beer-buzzed Angel was glomping a bikini-clad Carin from behind, hugging her and kissing her cheek, and with the big goofy grin plastered on Carin's face, her eyes wide with captured laughter, she looked as happy as Angel had ever seen her.

Carin touched the screen, brushing across the blond of her pixie faux hawk. She then rubbed at her now bald scalp and looked at Angel.

"Yeah, that's you. You . . . you remember the chemo, right?"

Carin tapped Angel's face on the phone. She pursed her lips and then spoke very slowly. "Ann . . . Kee?"

"Close enough, Baby. Close enough."

Carin zoomed in the image on Angel's lean, tatted-up arms. Carin then sat up in bed and put a finger at Angel's right deltoid, and Angel felt as she traced down through the skull and crossed flintlock pistols, the soaring bald eagle, and the band of thorny roses until she came to the simple inked words on Angel's forearm.

"I . . . car . . . ry. . . your . . . h . . . he . . . art . . . with . . . me," Carin said and then presented her own forearm to Angel.

"I carry it in my heart," Angel read slowly. They both grinned. They'd got the matching tattoos in a shop out in Buffalo three years ago, during their honeymoon road trip. They'd been pretty drunk. Carin had said it was from a poem by E. E. Cummings. Angel had never heard of him before, but that name was hilarious.

"You know what? I think everything's going to be all right," said Angel.

After Carin dozed off, Angel pulled on her boxers and pants and then spent a minute watching her sleep. Carin's ribs were still xylophones down her sides, and her previously perky a-cups still looked like little deflated pouches. But Angel thought she'd picked up a few pounds since her resurrection, and her skin had regained a healthy pink tone. Another day, and Carin would be ready to move. Angel tucked the sheets around her wife and stroked her bald head.

The small basement apartment probably belonged to the restaurant's owner, a fat, older Sicilian-looking man going by the family photos on the walls and desk. His wardrobe left something to be desired, but his white t-shirts didn't fit half-bad. She checked herself out in the mirror and fussed with her pompadour until it looked sufficiently cool.

She was getting at that age where she always had to be on the lookout for gray hairs, but with all that hydra-nanos in her blood, she had a feeling she wouldn't have to worry about that anymore. Her face hadn't exactly aged backwards, but it'd lost the slight puffiness in her cheeks and the circles under her hazel eyes. She guessed this was what she'd look like if she'd never smoked a cigarette, never sipped a beer.

As an afterthought, she picked up the handgun, re-checked that there wasn't a round chambered and stuffed it down the front of her jeans, gangsta-style. She left the bedroom and climbed the narrow, concrete-walled stairs to the restaurant's kitchen. The mouth-watering aroma of pork and romano cheese greeted her.

Dressed in a white coat and a chef's hat that covered his pointy ears, Mack was by a stove stirring a pot while he watched the sprawling holographic cityscape projected by one of his light combat drones. The glowing, translucent diorama hogged half of the floor space, which had been cleared when they'd used the tables to barricade the doors.

Mack gave her a nod. "You were down there a while."

Angel opened a fridge, grabbed an import beer. "My elf says exchanging bodily fluids gives her more nano healing shit. So we've been doing a lot of that."

"Cool. Can I watch?"

"Ha ha. No."

She tossed him a bottle underhanded. He caught it almost without looking and banged the cap off against the counter top. She squatted on the edge of a plastic chair and, patting her pockets, realized she left her cigarettes in the bedroom. It didn't matter. For some reason, she didn't want one that bad anyway. She used her bracelet to open her beer.

"How goes the show?" she asked.

The 'show' was the two miles up bird's eye view of Manhattan, courtesy of Mack's cloaked scouting drone. The sun had yet to rise, and so the island was projected in a light-enhanced dreariness that accentuated the dozens of smoking fires which scarred the city. Helicopter dots swarmed around like hungry flies.

"Mecha-Kong's about bitten the dust," Mack said, and the projection zoomed down on the ten story-tall robot gorilla she'd seen earlier at the Goldman Sachs Tower.

Crushing vehicles with every forward lurch, the mutilated giant machine crawled down a street running between two canyon walls of skyscrapers. It's left leg was gone, and its right arm dragged behind it. Half of its head was missing. Its torso looked as if it'd been chewed with flaming teeth. It tried to amble around the corner of a building, but a small fiery projectile slammed into its hide and exploded. The mechanical ape reared back, its remaining red eye gazing upward, and opened its hinged jaws. The scout drone didn't pick up the audio, but Angel heard the screaming faintly in the background beyond the restaurant's walls.

It wasn't the mock-Tarzan call of before. It sounded like a scared boy, blubbering and cursing. More missiles struck. It didn't take long. There was no dramatic, final explosion like out of a Michael Bay movie, but instead the massive chassis collapsed into a twisted, burning robotic skeleton.

"He chose . . . poorly," Mack said and swigged his beer.

Had the pilot just been a stupid kid who'd been given too much power and lashed out? Had there been problems at home? Bullies at school? She didn't know what she'd do if she'd been given a suit when she was sixteen, though she imagined her rampage would have been more 'Carrie' and less 'Godzilla.'

"He wasn't right in the head," she decided.

Mack snorted. "Yeah, but I also meant his mecha choices. He didn't take the 'flight' option--even though it was cheap. Instead he went for a 'giant slow robo-monkey' build, which did fuck all against jet fighters."

The hologram's focus swiveled up to zoom on the black silhouettes of three straight-winged aircraft soaring in formation in the dark clouds. She recognized their profile.

"A-10 Warthogs," she said. "Tank killers."

"Yeah, they're sending in the big boys now."

The image swept around to look across Upper Bay and slowly scan the northern coastline of Staten Island, several miles away. The resolution was a little grainy, but Angel could make out a number of tiny Humvees and military trucks running along the road in front of the high-rise apartments close to the shore. About a dozen armored vehicles Angel recognized as Bradleys, probably anti-aircraft M6 Linebackers, rolled past the twin white granite fins of that 9/11 Memorial sculpture. Above, more helicopters circled menacingly.

"We need to make like Snake Plisskin and get the fuck out of here," Mack said.

"Sounds good, but how? Your wings are still fucked, right?"

"Yeah, but even if they weren't we might not get too far flying. There's a few pilots that are treating this like an online deathmatch, but there's also the military. I think they're using thermal goggles or something because they've started shooting at any mecha that gets in the air--cloaked or not."

"And Carin wouldn't be cloaked, anyway," Angel said and sighed. "How about keeping our suits on our wrists and sneaking away like normal refugees? Manhattan's underwater tunnels might be clogged up deathtraps by now, but what about the Williamsburg Bridge? It's not far from here."

Mack sprinkled some garlic into the pot and stepped away from the stove to stand before the holographic map, which zoomed in on the southern tip of the island. Angel stood beside him. A small part of her wished she'd gone ahead with the cyber-brain implants. Controlling gear with pure thought was pretty cool.

Frowning, Mack pointed at a long, gray line stretching across the lighter gray of the East River. "Earlier some psycho mecha shot rockets at the bridge, killing who knows how many people. I'd be leery about walking across. And it's not like Brooklyn's going to be any safer than here."

Angel nodded. Carin's parents lived in Brooklyn. Her drunk-ass dad could go fuck himself, but her mom had always been nice enough, if a little intolerant in her Russian Orthodox beliefs. Had she evacuated all right? Hopefully, but Angel wasn't about to go exploring an urban war zone on the off chance they could find her. Carin came first.

"It'd be better if we could cross the Hudson," Angel said, "get back onto the mainland, but right now I think we should stay right here. We have food, water and if shit gets real, we can hide in the basement. It's still dangerous, but we can wait it out."

Stolen novel; please report.

"I don't think playing ostrich is going to work, Angel. Our problems aren't going away."

"They will and sooner than you think. If every city in the country's like this--panicked mobs, unchecked fires, killer robots--then the military's going come apart at the seams. They're not prepared for a worldwide warzone. They'll use up their fancy toys, their munitions, their fuel . . . and without a working infrastructure, they won't be getting any more. How many FBI choppers did we bag? Six? That's six they can't replace. And it won't be long before soldiers say to themselves, 'Where's my paycheck?' or 'I have a family to take care of,' or, 'Fuck it, let's go looting' and they'll slip out at night."

"And the mechas?"

Angel sipped her beer and shrugged. "The crazies will weed themselves out--like Mecha-Kong there. Once they're gone, what motive would we have to fight each other?"

Mack winced a little. "I was asking my elf about that . . . . You ever seen Highlander?"

"'There can be only one,' right?" Angel said and groaned. "Let me guess: pilots get power ups for killing each other."

Angel's elf startled her by responding aloud, "In a manner of speaking, yes. Suits can be harvested for components and resources. You've lost your combat drones and pulse laser carbine. Mack's lost his wings. If you defeat another pilot, you may be able to replace those."

She'd nearly forgotten her elf was there. It creeped her out, knowing it was always listening in. "Yeah, no offense, but we don't want to play that game. Everyday folks don't go around killing people just so they can take their stuff."

"After society collapses, that will change," Mack's elf said.

***

Because she felt she should be doing something to help, Angel chopped mushrooms and tomatoes for the lasagna, periodically pausing to sip her beer or slurp at a bowl of minestrone Mack had passed her. It was really good, thick with borlotti beans and the right amount of garlic. Mack said he'd used to be a chef a couple of years back, before his life fell into a downward spin. He knew what he was doing; she could say that much for him.

Angel wasn't one for trusting people she'd just met--much less an elf-man who only yesterday was a homeless drug addict--but saving Carin's life had scored him a lot of points. It still felt strange how they'd sort of fallen into an unspoken alliance. He could leave at any time, but he hadn't. Angel took that to mean they were friends now.

While the lasagna baked in the oven, they lounged around a table, popped open a five hundred dollar bottle of red wine with a long fancy name and took turns swilling it as if it were rotgut. It didn't taste any different to her than something five dollars at the grocery store, but then she was hardly a connoisseur.

"Don't know why you didn't take the elf option," he said after wiping his lips and passing her the bottle. "I got the six million dollar package: stronger, faster, better . . ."

"And you're no longer human."

"Eh, what did being human ever do for me?"

She swallowed the last of the bottle before speaking. "No offense, but I'm proud of who I am, where I came from. I may not be on speaking terms with my folks, but it doesn't mean I've forgotten my heritage."

"You're Italian, right?"

"My family came from Sicily."

"But . . . isn't 'Zacarias' a Hispanic name?"

"Yeah, the media thought so too. Called me a 'Latina role-model.' Of course, that was before I came out. But anyway, originally the name was Italian. Sort of." She paused, but decided to go ahead with the old story. "You see, way back in the fourteen hundreds or whatever, my family were Jews. And then one day King Ferdinand--that's the dude who hired Columbus--signed a new 'Fuck Jews' law--they did that a lot back then--and then some church guys showed up at my family's front door, waving hot branding irons in their faces and saying, 'Excuse me, sir, do you have a moment to talk about Jesus Christ?' My family decided then it was time to become Catholics, and 'Zacarias' was one of those Biblely last names that Italian Jews took when they converted. I think. Not sure how true any of that is, but that's what I've been told."

Mack opened his mouth as if to say, 'Ah,' but then the door to the basement opened.

Angel turned to see Carin step uneasily from the doorway, rubbing her eyes against the kitchen's fluorescent lights. She was wearing a white button-up shirt from the Sicilian man's closet, and it was big enough on her to be a long-sleeved sundress.

"Hey there, sleepyhead," Angel said slowly with a grin. "You hungry?"

Carin's wide purple eyes stared at the holographic spectacle of the aerial-view map, and then she looked at the Mack--tall, spindly, pointy-eared--sitting cross-legged in his chair. Slowly, she nodded.

Mack gave her a smile of perfect teeth. "Then you're in luck. Pull up a seat. Dinner's almost ready."

***

"So . . . s . . . spa . . . space elves? Me . . . mechas?"

"Pretty much." Angel held up her obsidian bracelet. "And me and Mack have suits too. They're pretty cool."

"Wh . . . what hap . . . pened to me?"

Angel glanced at Mack and hesitated. You were blown up because the FBI doesn't know how to say, 'Please.' But she didn't want to get into that right now.

"It's a long story, Baby. I'll explain it later. You're okay now, though. That's what counts."

At first, Carin had been scarfing the lasagna and minestrone as though she hadn't eaten in a week, but now she pushed the plate of second helpings aside and stood from the table. She stepped towards the hologram. Early dawn sunlight cast tiny, sharp shadows across the crammed expanse of blocky buildings. Most of the fires had either gone out or at least weren't as noticeable as they'd been at night, but dark, smoking swaths of rubble scarred the city as if it'd been torn by claws.

"Th . . . that's . . . that's New York?"

Angel knew what was coming next. "Yeah . . . shit's kind of gotten out of hand."

Carin gripped her bald head, rubbed her face. "Oh my god, oh my god oh my god . . . An . . . Angie . . . wh . . . what . . . what about my parents?"

"We'll . . . we'll stop by their apartments, I promise," Angel said, standing up. She was about to hug Carin from behind when her elf spoke aloud.

"Pilots incoming."

A second hologram sprouted next to the first, this one showing only a half mile radius of the immediate neighborhood. This was from Angel's own scout drone, the one patrolling the sky locally. Two winged figures, one large, one small, were careening like superheroes south down the high rise trench of 3rd Avenue--the street the restaurant was on. The hologram circled with an HUD the three dark dots of drones, which followed along as escorts.

The larger mecha--black and bulky with batlike wings--fired a salvo of rockets from its shoulders while the smaller mecha--shaped vaguely like a dragonfly--swerved upward. One of the contrails contacted the dragonfly's tail, and the explosion made it corkscrew and crashed along the side of a building. It rolled into the street. The other rockets wildly pelted the surrounding brick and asphalt. A couple of cars burst into flames. From the north, two helicopters cautiously circled in.

Angel felt as if she were watching a real-time strategy game, but through the walls she heard the distant rumbles: A hundred yards away, she guessed. She exchanged a look with Mack, and they both nodded. Angel took Carin's arm and led her towards the short hallway leading to the basement stairs.

"Baby, I need you to go downstairs. Don't worry, we'll be all right."

Carin hesitated on the first steps. "But--" She cut off and her eyes widened as Angel's black bracelet magically unfolded, enveloping her in her powered armor.

As soon as the helmet visor snapped into place, granting its weird peripheral fishbowl, a HUD from Angel's scout appeared in the corner of her vision. The bat had landed, and its wings folded into its back. Judging my the scale of the nearby overturned van, the mecha stood about thirty feet tall. Its right forearm extended into a glowing cannon, and it shot the fallen dragonfly with a blue laser wreathed in lightning. It then stepped over, folded back its gun, and began to tear into the dragonfly with sharp silver talons.

Angel turned to Mack. He was in his suit too, repaired now since she'd seen it last at the hospital. Its face was featureless silver. With its shiny plates contoured into an elongated musculature, he looked like a beanpole strongman made of mirrors.

In the HUD, one of the bat mecha's drones swept casually past the helicopters, and they both erupted into smoke. One tumbled towards Union Square, the other . . .

"Shouldn't we--?," Mack's voice began in her ear.

Angel grabbed Carin by the shoulders and hustled her along the hallway. "Let's go, now!"

The helicopter was an Apache, armed with rockets and missiles. It crashed spinning into the street like a smoldering leaf dropped from a tree, and Angel heard the outside impact of metal on asphalt. In her HUD, the helicopter blossomed into a fireball. The kitchen's south wall exploded inward in a wave of brick and flame. The building shook. The hallway shuddered into a funhouse slant. The apartment floors above the restaurant rumbled and cracked.

No. Not again. Not this fucking time.

Angel practically pushed Carin down the stairs. Her wife grabbed the handrail to keep from somersaulting forward.

"Get the fuck down there!" Angel shouted.

For a moment, Carin only gawked at her, but she then turned and stumbled down the dark steps. Angel began to follow, but she heard a roar. The ceiling buckled and dumped like a waterfall around her. Something hard smacked her across her armored shoulders and she fell. The world was angry rubble, crowding her, drowning her. Mack was cursing in her ear.

That she was in a hyper-advanced alien cybersuit was of course the only reason she wasn't a red smear, but even with her enhanced strength, it took a while for her to pry her way out from beneath the piled drywall and wooden beams. She looked up into the gray morning overcast, fogged by the thick, chalky dust billowing around her. Only one side of the building had collapsed, and its debris was strewn across the street in a mini-mountain range. The wreckage of the helicopter smoldered nearby like a bonfire in a mist. The remaining half of the building, jagged and splintered, loomed above like a mutilated giant. It creaked ominously. She heard a child crying somewhere in the distance.

"Hey, Angel, you all right?" Mack asked.

Angel didn't reply. Almost without thinking, she activated her cloak. Beside her was the stairway, relatively unblocked. She switched to thermal vision, changing her color palette to shades of blue.

"Carin . . . Carin . . . are you . . . ?" she called out.

The heat from her wife's head cut through the dust as an orange blob. She was peeking from the bedroom door, coughing.

"An . . . Angie . . . where . . . ?"

"Come up to me, Baby. We got to get out of here."

In her extended peripheral, Angel saw a small sphere soar overhead. She turned, and it stopped in midair, swiveled around. It was teardrop shaped, its thermal-shade faintly yellow. Along its smooth mirrored face stared three black bug eyes.

"I see youuu!" a young man's singsong voice said over her radio.

In Angel's scout HUD window, the bat mecha ceased dismembering the dragonfly and stood up. The laser cannon extended out again from its right arm. The thirty foot tall machine turned and began to swagger towards the restaurant, its gun at the ready. Two more drones flocked around it.

Fuck.

She heard the scrapping clatter as Mack climbed out from under a pile of bricks and squatted beside her. His armor looked a little dinged but otherwise intact. An overlong rifle about the size and shape of a M107 Barrett folded out from his back.

"Looks like it's our first mecha fight," he said.

Angel's plasma bow butterflied out of from her arm. "Yeah."

To be continued . . .

***