Kent Kelly - Archangel

Careful, now. Someone is out there.

She raised herself up into a spidery crouch and swept the flashlight’s beam further into the darkness. The beam’s frayed edges caught the glitter of some broad metallic surface out in the farther cave. Was that the H4 at the edge of sight?

She spared a look to the ceiling. There. At the angle she had assumed, it was actually quite easy to tilt the beam of light and to beckon forth the shadows, forcing them to reveal the hidden outline of the painted crane socket indented above the shaft. Tom had cored away some of the ceiling stone so that the crane-hinge was actually flush within its hole up there, flat with the planed and carved-out surface of the ceiling. Looking more closely, Sophie noticed for the first time that all of the stone in the narrow had been spray-painted the same dull hue, almost certainly for the sole purpose of concealing the crane from unwanted eyes.

Right, then.

She stood fully, glancing over her shoulder to look behind her. A foolish gesture, for without pivoting at the waist she only caught a better glimpse of her own suit’s interior and her breath’s humidity streaking down the insides. If anyone wanted to ambush her, seize her, this was the perfect time for them to do it.

She stood up on tiptoe, reached, and just barely caught the tip of the crane’s hidden hook with two fingers. Her glove slipped easily off the steely surface, but a squeak of the crane’s joist told her that the assembly was ready to move.

One thing working perfectly, she mused. At last.

Solo-operating the crane, from what she had read, would be exhausting after awhile but fairly easy. By fully snapping down the two levers and snap-locking the aluminum joint in place, by swiveling the hook-and-pulley over the shaft’s center, she would be able to drape plastic cording or even a chain over the pulley wheel and begin the work. She could winch up the flats of supplies in a matter of a couple hours or even less.

Satisfied that her position was not hopeless, Sophie held her breath and turned away from the crane assembly once again. It was time to search the cave.

She knew all at once then, chilled by a trickle of certainty: if no one had yet attacked her, there would be many more dead bodies. There would be horrible things she would need to see. But she had to keep moving. She had no choice.

She cinched her flashlight between her left elbow and hip as she repositioned, unclipping her gun. She crept out of the tunnel and into the wider cave, following the fractured glo-lites, the dancing crimson radiance of the outside world spun into whorls by the endless cascading of the waterfall. The world went a little brighter, running with a glow too much like blood.

And oh, Sophie, what beautiful wonders will we see?

A giggling inside her, icy echoes all around her.

She kept moving. She went through rote actions, machine actions, shifting her load and readying herself as best she could. The knife was pulled a half-inch from its boot sheath, and then left there at the ready. The flashlight was poised in her left hand, the gun with its safety off held firmly in her right. If forced to fire, she would need to make a split-second decision to either drop the flashlight to control the gun, or fire one-handed and likely get spun by the power of the recoil. But if there was more than one enemy, more than one man she needed to kill, she might not have a choice.

Silas can’t protect you here, Sophie told herself. Your protector is dependent on you until you can get him out of here. He can’t do anything to defend you until you get him moving. You are the strong one now, you are the only.

The only.

She compelled herself to walk toward the glittering metallic surface, slowly sweeping her light from side to side. Her eye was first drawn to the greasy and looming bulk of the H4. The Hummer was shunted off at an angle she did not remember. The windshield was starred and cracked where rubble had fallen down and pelted it, but the safety glass hadn’t shattered. The chrome bumper and the tubing of the grille were all badly crunched where the SUV had rebounded off the cave wall, when Sophie had first sped into the cave and crashed to a halt. She could see that one of the four headlights was cracked, another entirely shattered. But at least two, possibly three, of the lights might work. There were still jagged rocks, some bigger than cinderblocks, resting in ugly divots in the hood.

The driver’s door was open.

Sophie put the flashlight down on the hood and advanced with a gliding sideways gait, pointing the way with the HK submachine gun held in both gloved hands. She circled and looked down at a halo of shattered glass. There surrounded by crystalline splinters was lain the body of a boy, badly rotted, crumpled on the muddy ground.

He must have been about sixteen. He was almost in the fetal position, and horribly — or perhaps mercifully, her buzzing mind could scarcely process what she was seeing and could not weigh the determination — the boy had managed to bury his face in both of his pustule-covered hands. She could not see the death agony etched across his features, but she could feel it. It was all that remained of him.

Wind howled outside. The reflected light shifted as the wind spun at the waterfall’s traces, revealing far too many of the details. The back of the boy’s head was bashed in and a ghastly, hinged piece of skull was hanging on by a clump of blood-clotted hair. It was like a doorway, a tiny little Alice in Wonderland door, and inside it was most of the boy’s pulverized and rotted brain.

As Sophie forced herself to look away, searching the shadows for targets (And who could be here and not have already killed you?) , a thought crossed into the chill of her returning awareness: why weren’t there any flies here either?

They’re all dead, Sophie, Patrice sang patiently to the silence. Why don’t you have a look around? So, so beautiful. Everything is dead.

Sophie looked everywhere but the boy’s hands and that horrible, gaping wound. She stared at the boy’s arms, his wrists, his pathetically exposed back where the yellow t-shirt had been yanked up in some kind of struggle. He had a deep and sloppy knife gash where one of his kidneys must have been, and a sticky gravity-smear of old black blood had bubbled out from it and curdled upon the cave floor. Congealed defensive wounds covered his forearms like tiger stripes.

Enough.

Raising her gun higher, following the reflected beam of light, she walked around the H4 and looked out into the waterfall. There was the black-and-crystal silhouette of Pete’s police car, stuck in the muddy pool at the mouth of the cave. A halo of roiling crimson radiance shone through the falling waters.

And that was all. There was no one left alive inside the cave.

So go see. Why don’t you go out there and make sure?

Sophie walked out a little further, getting in front of the patrol car’s grille. But there, somehow sitting up against the front left wheel with her knees up and split apart, there was the body of an older-than-teenage girl.

Sophie beheld much before she was able to look away.

The girl’s head had lolled and frozen at a broken angle. Her pants had been yanked off and thrown into the pool, and they were still swirling fitfully in an endless circle along the spiral current. All of the girl’s fingers had been horribly broken. They were tilted off at angles like snapped twigs.

She had a gunshot to her forehead, and something like old oatmeal had dripped down from that hole, forming a meaty pink streak down the right side of her nose.

Oh look, She has such cute nose. Turned-up nose. Inside Sophie, someone giggled once again.