The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (62 page)

“I don’t know anything,” Elsa said, squeezing the bridge of her nose. “Other than the fact that you lied to me and tricked me and made me think—well, that doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t true.”

Lisa-Marie touched Elsa’s leg. The expression on her face seemed almost as distraught as Elsa felt. “It was true. I’m not that good an actress. As much as I care about my job, I care about you, too. Do you know that they’re starting to identify possible cancer clusters around TSA agents? Tell me you wear a dosimeter to measure radiation.”

“I’m not worried about radiation,” Elsa retorted. “I’m worried about lawyers who try to use me so they can win some frivolous lawsuit!”

“It’s not frivolous!” Lisa-Marie insisted. “Backscatter and other screening machines could pose more dangers to the public than we’ve ever seen. I was supposed to ask you about your job, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to ruin what we’ve got started here. Tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

The taxi inched forward. They were still stuck in the damned parking lot, and might be for an hour. The cabbie was watching them in the rear-view mirror with unabashed interest. Elsa glared at him until he dropped his gaze and started fiddling with his meter.

“I don’t feel anything,” Elsa said. “How could I?”

She tossed a ten dollar bill over the divider and slid out of the cab. Lisa-Marie followed, but it was easy to lose her in the crowd pouring from the theater. Elsa kept moving and kept her gaze down. She seemed surrounded by lovers walking hand in hand, laughing and kissing, all these happy people, while she suffered the hollow, queasy feeling of being humiliated.

When her phone rang with a text message she nearly threw it in the lake, but the number was Christopher’s. The Class A had been caught again at the Orlando airport. Where should he pick her up?

Elsa squared her shoulders, wiped her face dry and went back to work.

A Freedom of Information lawsuit filed today against the Department of Homeland Transportation alleges that images of thousands of people entering federal courthouse have been saved and stored without consent or awareness. The backscatter technology involved is the same used in airport screening lanes. A separate lawsuit alleges that the zones around these machines can expose the population to radiation that exceeds the “general public dose limit”. –
WJCT, Jacksonville FL.

Norfolk. Hartford. Manchester. Albany. Elsa figured that Lisa-Marie had tracked her so easily because she preferred one particular hotel chain, so she started mixing up her choices. She kept away from any that had swimming pools. Her back started to ache from so many hours in airplane seats, and her clothes began to get depressingly tight, so she doubled the workouts she did in her room. In Boston she tripped over an ottoman while doing lunges and had to use crutches for three days.

Elsa knew she should have reported Lisa-Marie to DHS but she didn’t really want to call down that kind of scrutiny on her. Once the government started keeping files, it kept on collecting information. Better to just forget the whole thing. Elsa didn’t answer emails or calls from people she didn’t know, she ate alone in her room each night, and she went to bed resolutely not thinking about long dark hair, a heart-shaped face and lovely dimples.

The last part would have been easier if she didn’t turn on the news one night to see Lisa-Marie on TV, being interviewed about electronic privacy. She looked smart and professional in a black business suit, her eyes hidden behind glasses. Like Superman masquerading as Clark Kent, Elsa thought uncomfortably. Fighting for what seemed like civil rights, but only because she didn’t know what danger America really was in.

“More people need to realize what information is being collected without their knowledge,” Lisa-Marie was saying. “We need to understand more about these machines.”

Elsa turned off the TV.

An AXB machine in Newark alerted with a Class A. Christopher picked her up at a Holiday Inn parking lot with a new technician named Alice. “Andrew’s out on disability,” Christopher said tightly when Elsa asked about him.

“What for?” Elsa asked.

Christopher turned the van toward the terminal. “Stomach cancer.”

“It’s not job-related,” Elsa said, though she wasn’t sure if she was asking a question or not.

Christopher said, “Probably not.”

“We’re not exposed to enough,” Elsa insisted. “You know the specs.”

“I know what they tell us,” he replied.

Alice popped her head up from the back seat of the van. She was short and dark-haired, with a pixie cut and purple eyeshadow. “Are we there yet? This is my first big one.”

Elsa sat back in her seat. Christopher said nothing.

The B1 security checkpoint was closed by the time they arrived. Their TSA contact was a big ex-football player named Tyrone Graham who sat in a plastic chair, arms folded, and glared at them for making him work overtime. Elsa ignored him. She had a hard time locating the Class A image. She realized that someone on the local staff had been moving around images in direct violation of protocol – storing groups of them in a local folder instead of keeping everything in one place.

She opened a sub-folder. Over a hundred images had been saved there. Woman, all of them, their faces blurred but their curvy bodies in clear view. Another folder had children, all of them standing with their arms raised over their heads in the same way as the adults.

“Ew,” Alice said. “Someone’s a creep, huh? I thought operators weren’t supposed to set up their little peep shows.”

“They’re not supposed to.” Elsa angrily deleted the folders. She would report the incident, but didn’t know if anything would come of it. Philadelphia was good at collecting information and not very good at passing it down. Meanwhile whoever had been hoarding images would just start all over again, with plenty of material passing by every day.

She tried to focus on the task in front of her. When the Class A image popped up, it was attached to the image of an overweight man with a prosthetic knee. Like that long-ago one in Columbus, this demon had a head perched above the spread-open wings. The head was round and small, tilted slightly as if quizzically looking at the scanner. Some kind of circle hung around it, like a ring around Saturn.

“What is that?” Christopher asked curiously.

“I don’t know,” Elsa said. Her heart thumped faster in her chest and her palms turned sweaty.

Alice snapped her chewing gum. “Looks like a halo. Pretty funny.”

Elsa met Christopher’s gaze. If you believed in demons, then why not their opposites? For a moment he looked like he wanted to say something, but then his gaze slid across the empty security lanes to their TSA guy.

“Let’s do it and get out of here,” he said.

Elsa couldn’t help herself. “What if some of them are protecting people, not hurting them? What if everything we’ve been told is wrong?”

“It’s not,” Christopher said tightly. “It’s not, because then you would lose your job. Do you understand me? You would lose your job and your income, and anything more would violate your security clearance, and how do you feel about a home visit from federal agents with guns? Because I, myself, would not like that at all.”

Alice snapped her chewing gum again.

Elsa’s fingers trembled as she started the download. She watched the creature slowly fade down the pipeline, its head tilted thoughtfully, its halo and wings disappearing into nothingness.

Later that night, Elsa herself disappeared.

“I didn’t know,” she said, standing in the drenching rain outside of Lisa-Marie’s front door. “I didn’t know any of it.”

Lisa-Marie was dressed only in a white bathrobe. It was just after dawn. Her hair was messy and her face creased from the pillow. “You’re soaked. Come in.”

Elsa shook her head. She didn’t deserve to be warm and dry yet. “I want to help find out what’s really going on. I want people to know the truth and what the government is doing. But I don’t know how, and I don’t know who to trust. What do you do when you don’t even know if you’re standing on solid ground anymore?”

Thunder rolled in the sky over their heads. The rain came down harder, but Elsa was beyond feeling cold.

“You come to someone who cares about you.” Lisa-Marie stepped out into the rain with her arms open and Elsa buried her head against her shoulder. “You come to me, and we’ll find out the truth together.”

One Saturday Night, with Angel

Peter M. Ball

The word
apocalypse
originally meant “revelation”: the disclosure of something previously hidden. In the Christian New Testament, the Revelation of John (in Greek:
Apocalypsis Ioannou),
describes the ultimate triumph of good over evil and, consequently, the world. Apocalypse is commonly used today to connote total devastation or the end of the world as we know it. Angels play many roles in John’s Apocalypse, but the most prominent capacity is to bring judgement to those on Earth. The angels in Peter M. Ball’s story are not biblical, but they do bring judgement.

If you ask Mike, the problem with the angels is they smell like laundry powder. They have that real caustic, back-of-thethroat kind of smell that burns itself in. Mike is sick of having that smell in his throat 24-7, and he wants it gone.

There’s an angel on the roof of the Nite Owl when Mike comes in for the late shift. He thinks it’s the same angel that’s been following him for six days, but all the angels look the same. The angel is nude, covering its gaunt body with black wings and gauze bandages around its hands and feet. Mike’s stuck in the puke-yellow Nite Owl uniform that makes everyone look sick.

Conventional wisdom says six days of seeing the same angel increases your chances of a purging. Mike tries not to worry about it. He’s got a graveyard shift, ten ’til morning, the one he traded with Skull last week before the angel showed up. Skull says he’s playing a gig with his death-metal band tonight and that’s why he can’t work. Mike doesn’t buy that for a second. No one plays death-metal after midnight on a Saturday anymore, not unless they’ve got a death wish.

Not that Mike cares; he likes the nightshift. He waves to the angel.

“Hey,” Mike says. The angel crouches down, mute shadow against the sky, wings spread out so they eliminate a broad swathe of stars. People say you’re supposed to avoid talking to angels but Mike figures it isn’t going to hurt. It’s been six days after all, it’s not like anything he does in the next couple of hours will make a difference.

They use fluorescent lights in the Nite Owl. Mike’s eyes are raw after a week of being followed by an angel and its smell so the fluorescents make his eyes water. The entire building creaks every time the angel on the roof moves. Mike takes Patty’s spot behind the counter and changes the radio station on the stereo.

“You look tired,” Patty says. She’s too young for this job and prone to stating the obvious.

“Whatever,” Mike says. “Have a good night, yeah?”

The angel makes people nervous, so the first hour is dead in the water. Nothing happens until Elvis shows up at midnight. Not the real Elvis, he’s still dead, just an Elvis whose parents happened to be big fans of the King. Elvis disappears into the fridges at the back of the store, stocking up on the staples that will take him through ’til morning. His next stop is the magazine aisle. Elvis paws through the racks and picks up a
Playboy
. He considers it for a few seconds and looks up at the ceiling, then shakes his head and puts it back. The other side of the aisle is filled with foil-wrapped chocolates. Elvis grabs a fistful of Violet Crumbles and dumps them on the counter.

“Hey,” Elvis says.

“Hey,” Mike says. He yawns and rubs his eyes. Elvis shuffles from foot to foot. The sliding doors open and a small group of club-girls wanders through fresh off the bus and hungry for hot dogs. Four girls in the group, and one of them is hot, all bare midriff and long legs.

“You got an angel on the roof,” Elvis says. He’s maybe twenty-six and soft, belly bulging beneath his loose-fitting Sex Pistols T. Elvis doesn’t want his parents to think he shares their music tastes, and he wants to hide his gut. He has the kind of belly you want to poke.

Mike starts ringing up the Cokes and the chocolate. The angel on the roof shifts its weight again, just a little, and the entire building creaks. One of the girls squeals, the club-girls always squeal, and the floor is full of dropped onions and hot dog buns. The other girls giggle. Mike finishes ringing up the last Crumble bar.

“That’s twelve seventy,” he tells Elvis. They look at the mess on the floor by the hot dog bar. Mike says, “Yeah, I might have noticed the angel.”

Elvis fishes in his pockets. Then he stops.

“I wanted a pack of cigarettes,” he says. “Sorry. Winnie Blues.”

Mike turns around and picks up a pack. One of the girls has put a hot dog in the microwave. The smell of melting cheddar starts fighting back against the angel smell. Mike rings up the cigarettes and tosses them into a plastic bag with the Coke. Elvis has noticed the club-girls now. He’s gawking at the hot one.

“How long do you reckon it will hang around?” Elvis says. “The angel, I mean.”

Mike shakes his head.

“They’re usually here for a couple of hours, at least,” he says. “This one’s mine though; it’s been following me for days.”

“Man, that sucks,” Elvis says. “Why the hell did you come to work?”

Mike yawns. “What else are you going to do? Repent? You know how the winged bastards work.”

Elvis grins like he does, but he doesn’t. All he’s got are theories, just like Mike. Just like everyone else. It’s stupid, if you ask Mike; all those purges and no one knows a damn thing for sure. All they’ve got are theories.

The angel smell is getting worse. The first of the club-girls makes it to the counter. She’s carrying two hot dogs, a literbottle of Coke and a purse held open so she can dig for her wallet. It’s the hot one. Elvis swallows, really loud and noticeable. Mike rolls his eyes.