11
Firestorm

She stands staring out over the city by night. The buildings stand cramped together like components on the circuit board of a computer. In another place it was not like this; there were no buildings, only vast plains of iron timbers, domes like the broken eggshells of monstrous birds, and fires...

There was always fire.

Fire...and ashes.

No. She has discipline. She shakes off the invading voices, the tumult of images.

She feels well now, no headache, her thoughts sharper, less difficult to direct. She clenches her fist and feels a surge of energy rise up through her body to center on her head. She is a Machine. She is malleable, like water. But like water, few can hold against her. She glances down at her shadow lying at her feet and watches as a series of swords grow upward from the crown of her head. They are sharp. As sharp as the razors on her gauntlets and shins, as sharp as the stink of water and chemical death drifting on the night air.

With scarcely a thought she leaps down, down, down the forty stories to the floor of the city below and the street that rolls itself outward like a carpet to carry her to the place of war.

12
The Writing on the Wall

"Caroline, I don't really think this is a good idea."

"Shh," she hissed as she slid in through the steel door with Sandy in tow. Fearful of being noticed from outside, she waited until the pneumatic door clicked home behind them before switching on her penlight. The meager light hit aspects of the office area-signs that said this and that about Allman's Dry Cleaning and announced other banal services which concerned her not at all. She noticed the vague outlines of desks shoved haphazardly against the walls to make room for salvage work, and what looked to be a great gutted photocopier of some late seventies monster-style.

Caroline pointed her penlight at the ceiling where a gaping hole revealed a naked rafter squirming with a particularly active nest of wood mites. "No one's been in here in years," she said.

"Smart of them."

Caroline turned to face her accomplice. Sandy stood holding his camera, neck craning this way and that as if he were struggling to pick up on even the slightest shuffle. The whites of his eyes shone like porcelain in the dark.

"What is wrong with you?" Caroline said.

Sandy shook his head. "Dreamed I bowled two hundred last night, and then realized I was on the lanes without my pants. Scary, y'know?"

Caroline frowned. "You dreamed you bowled naked last night, so you're afraid of buying it today. Makes sense to me."

"Hey, Grams was a Haitian hounigan. She always used to say a bad dream means something..."

"Don't eat the guacamole before bed..." Caroline said in her spookiest voice.

"I'm serious, Caroline. Grams was never wrong."

Caroline swung the penlight through the dark like a sword to ward off things unseen. Broken floors and rat-eaten walls sagged in at them at every turn. Ghosts and voodoo she could deal with, but what was really starting to worry her was that maybe there wasn't a stable staircase to be found in this whole derelict building. In fact, she was nearly ready to call it quits when something odd got caught in the beam of her light, something no wood mite had made, no mouse and no rat could have done. She swore and pulled up short.

Sandro plow into her from behind and knock the light from her hand.

Splash.

Thankfully, the light hadn't gone out.

"Jesus God," Sandy whispered. He too had seen it, if only briefly.

Numbed, shaking a little, Caroline could well imagine Sandy crossing himself a half dozen times as she went to fetch the light from a corner puddle. She grabbed it up from the stagnate water, swung it around like the swordsman on the defense she felt like she was.

The light caught the holes in the plaster, the rotted deathtraps in the floor. The light crawled one brutalized wall and centered in on the weathered wainscoting near the ceiling. Caroline said nothing at all. She doubted she could have even if she had wanted to. She could do nothing but stare mute with fear and amazement at the two enormous ruts newly etched in the walls of Allman's, cut with the precision of a pair of razor-sharp swords-three inches deep apiece and nine feet in the air.

13
Dark Angel

Darry stirred. The dust and stench of standing water made him cough. He'd made an impromptu bed for himself in the corner of the factory-scraps of scratchy fiberglass insulated from his body by a greasy old sheet-and turned over fitfully in it. It was not so weird for him to sleep here these days, especially when Dylan and his lackeys were being particularly persistent or Dad particularly drunk. But he'd never felt this uncomfortable before. Or this...watched.

Darry opened his eyes. Still dark. Not a shred of light poured in through the generous holes in the ceiling. No moon, full or otherwise, shone through the industrial mesh windows a dozen years uncleaned. And yet something-some thing-had awakened him.

He sat up. Something was here with him. He was sure of it.

He glanced around.

He was alone, as far as he could tell...and yet he was not...

"Hello?"

Something to the left caught his eye, a motion amidst the still and cobwebby machinery that had laundered the city's clothes once upon a time. He watched the spot intently. It was a lot like an optical illusion or a grainy photograph where you just can't seem to make out anything yet. But Darry had patience and very little real fear for the unknown these days. It couldn't be any more dangerous than the known, could it?

Could it?

Darry rubbed at his sandy eyes. A shape was slowly coming clear to him, a humanoid shape. And yet one so incredible, so impossible, that for a moment he wrote off what he saw as some kind of fantasy. Too many comic books, Darry-boy, too too many...

And yet it did not reform or vanish like a fantasy was supposed to do. It didn't change at all.

He couldn't be entirely certain, but he thought he was staring at the image of a silver-skinned angel with a crown of swords on her head.

He blinked and looked again.

It turned its head and looked back at him.

Darry felt his heart quicken and his palms sweat. People did not usually look on angels and live, he was fairly certain of that. He wondered who she was. A messenger? Mother? Maybe. Maybe Mother had returned to earth to collect her half-orphaned child and take him back with her to Heaven or wherever she lived these days. But he couldn't know for certain if it was her; he only had one old wedding photo of Mother, and that had been damaged a long time ago by a spilt bottle of Acers. It could be Mother.

Darry stood up.

It held perfectly still and watched him approach. Its eyes were like jade glass lit from within. Intelligent. Angelic. Impossible.

He was less than a dozen paces from it when it decided to move.

It didn't move much. It moved enough. It stepped halfway out of the shadows.

Darry stopped. Darry felt his hopes take a long hike into the deepest recesses of his brain. What it left behind was a kind of numbing terror beyond his ability to control or fight.

No, he was wrong; it was not an angel, not Mother. It was not anything that had ever existed, or should. It was something else. It was an automaton like in the comic books. It had a tragic masklike face and a headful of swords glittering in the dimness, swords that were painfully sharp to look upon. Swords that could cut through human flesh like a cleaver through a slice of steak.

Darry let out his breath in a gasp.

It let out a noise like a hiss and brought up a long metallic rod in a vertical bar across its segmented middle.

It was fast, too fast. Darry felt a rush of air on his cheeks and eyelashes. And then it was suddenly standing over him, the end of the staff a mere inch from his forehead, the weapon pointing at him like the barrel of a gun.

A shudder swept through Darry's limbs. He was numb. He was dead. Dead for real this time. Dead for good...