Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“I think you might be dying,” she said.

He groaned into his chair, which rocked on uneven legs. “Just tired.”

“Weren’t you just sleeping?”

“Was I?”

“You’re weird.”

Clementine turned to look out the open door. From the tower upstairs, she could see past the brush and shrubs to May-May’s garden and, past the garden, to May-May and Pay’s houses. From down here, though, she couldn’t see anything.

“What kind of hoodlum are you?” she said.

His head fell sideways. “How old are you?”

She stepped back out onto the porch. “I have to go.”

On Monday a cat Clementine had never seen before crawled under the pricker bush in the lot beside May-May’s garden. She waited two days before poking it with a stick.

Science! Would the cat shrivel up and turn to dust? Would rats come and pick its bones? Would she get to see what it looked like on the inside?

For the rest of the week, she raced to the pricker bush after school with her notebook.

Day 3: It stinks. Looks the same .

Day 4: It stinks even more. Fur is falling off. Flies all over the place.

Day 5: Something ate its butt. It smells disgusting. Covered in ants.

On day six, her mother found out about her fractions test, and Clementine was grounded until day nine.

By then the cat had lost almost all its fur and its stomach was puffy, and Clementine was afraid that if she poked the cat again, it would explode, and she’d get covered in guts.

On day ten, she spent the afternoon at home watching cartoons. Car, for a change, was somewhere else.

The next morning Clementine was on her way to school, less than a block away, with exactly two minutes to spare, when Dobbs appeared, turning the corner at the old fire station, coming straight toward her. Clementine was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he was in the same heavy coat as always. There was no one else on the street but the two of them. She waved, and he kept right on going, like she was invisible.

He turned onto Bernadine Street, heading home. She thought about following him, but the bell was going to go off at any second, and she knew what would happen if she got another tardy.

The next morning the same thing happened all over again: Clementine going to school, Dobbs going the other way. Same time, same place.

It occurred to her he must’ve been out all night. And he was only now returning home.

But where in the world could he have been?

§

Her mistake was saying she felt sick before asking what was for dinner. When she sat down at the table that night, there was spaghetti with garlicky bread, and her mother had even made meatballs. Clementine knew if she made a pig of herself now, her mother would see she’d been lying. So instead she picked at her plate while Mama and May and Pay and Car twirled birds’ nests on their forks and crammed them into their mouths. They were so busy stuffing themselves, they didn’t notice Clementine slipping pieces of bread into her pocket.

As Car went back for a second helping, Clementine clenched her stomach and moaned. “May I be excused?”

Pay looked like he was going to give her his usual you’regonnastayinyourseattileveryone’sdone , but then he raised a paper napkin to his lips and nodded toward the stairs.

Clementine went up and then straight out the window and over to Bernadine Street.

* * *

It was dark by the time Dobbs finally appeared on the porch, shutting the door behind him. Clementine’s knees were woven with the impressions of grass and twigs. It was getting cold, and she wished she’d brought a sweatshirt.

He was easy to follow. She didn’t even have to be directly behind him. Every once in a while he disappeared in a screen of trees and bushes, but she never lost his trail, even with blocks of empty lots between them. She knew these streets better than anyone.

But after a few minutes, they’d left the neighborhood behind. She couldn’t see Pay’s house anymore. There were empty homes and storefronts, but they weren’t the ones she was used to.

They must have gone twenty blocks. Most of the street signs were missing. She kept track of the turns using landmarks: broken fences, burned-out cars, heaps of junk. Just when it was starting to seem like they were wandering aimlessly, Dobbs turned down a narrow alley. At the end of the alley was a warehouse, two stories tall. Brick and cinderblock, all of it old and crumbly. Around the side there was a garage. Clementine was close enough behind him that when he lifted the overhead door, she saw a big van parked inside.

The door rattled shut behind him.

There were windows, but they were too high for her to see through. On the ground all around were scraps of metal. They were sharp and cold and rusty and boring and they didn’t look like anything. The only sound was the drone of the highway coming from she couldn’t tell where.

She hugged her arms across her chest. She’d given up spaghetti and meatballs for this?

Then it started to rain.

Everyone else was downstairs watching TV when Clementine sneaked back inside. She dove under the covers and took out her book. Through the floor she could hear the laugh track laughing hysterically to itself.

Her favorite book. Life, she read for probably the thousandth time, had begun on earth with single-cell organisms that lived in the sea. Almost four billion years ago. It took millions of years for those first single cells to attach to other cells. After all that time and hard work, the ice age came, and 440 million years ago most of those early organisms froze themselves to extinction.

When the ice melted, what remained were plants, mosses, and algae. As the Earth warmed, insects appeared. Corals in the oceans built reefs. But the oceans were hit hard again around 374 million years ago, and the reefs suffered the worst of it.

There were five mass extinctions in all. The one that wiped out the insects came 252 million years ago. That was the biggest extinction of all, killing virtually everything on land and sea. It took tens of millions of years for life to recover. During that time, amphibians and reptiles first appeared, but most of them were killed in the fourth mass extinction, which cleared the way for the dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs eventually got theirs, too. Whether it was an asteroid or volcanoes, no one knew, but whatever it was blotted out the sun. First the plants died, then the animals that lived off the plants, and then the animals that lived off them. What survived were the scavengers.

And then we came, appearing recognizably human about two hundred thousand years ago, and even though we came last, we behaved as though we’d been here forever, as if we were the goal everything else had been leading to. But most scientists, including the author of Clementine’s favorite book, believed a sixth mass extinction had already begun.

All a person had to do was go outside and look around.

§

The warehouse door was so solid that when she knocked, she barely made a sound. There were no lights on inside, but she knew Dobbs was here. She’d set her alarm to go off two hours early, and she’d left May and Pay’s house when the sky was still thick as gravy.

She knocked again. Overhead, between the trees, a pair of bats twirled like a twist tie. She pressed herself up against the door. Last year her class had taken a field trip to a bat sanctuary. She knew these were probably brown bats. Harmless. Living bug zappers. But they were still ten times more disgusting than even a hundred dead cats.

A moment passed, and she noticed a shadow — or maybe a reflection — gliding past one of the windows. She tried to watch it, but without taking her eye off the bats. She banged again on the door, and the shadow advanced the length of the building a window at a time. It stopped on the other side of the overhead door.