The Storm (17 page)

It seemed like an eternity before anyone spoke. Cal stood and stared at Rilke as she sobbed against her dead brother. Other than her, the only noise was the hail-like patter of debris as the heavens cast back the earth.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Daisy. She was still kneeling on the floor next to Rilke and Schiller, her hand on the boy’s chest. ‘I’m really, really sorry, Rilke.’

Rilke didn’t reply, her eyes dark and small, staring at something nobody else could see. Daisy looked at Cal and he smiled as best he could remember, holding out his hands to her. She struggled up and flew into him, hugging him tight, her gentle sobs breaking against his chest.

‘What now?’ asked Brick. He kicked at scraps of stone on the floor, his hands wedged in his pockets. ‘It’s over, right. For us, I mean.’

‘No,’ said Daisy, wiping her eyes. ‘We have to go after him. He isn’t dead.’

Brick’s eyes bulged and he shook his head.

‘No way. We did our part. We scared it away. Let someone else handle it.’

‘There is no one else, Brick,’ she replied. ‘There’s just us.’

‘But who are you?’ asked the motorbike guy, Graham. He still stood on the other side of the street, just past that invisible threshold. He kept glancing nervously at the sky, his phone open in his hand. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Join the club,’ said Brick.

‘You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,’ added Daisy. The man snorted a laugh.

‘Wouldn’t believe that I saw you on fire, with wings, flying up there fighting the . . . the whatever that thing was? Try me, I’m more open-minded than I was this morning.’

‘It doesn’t matter what we are,’ said Daisy. ‘It’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to stop it.’

‘But what
is
it?’

‘Evil,’ said Marcus from where he crouched on the ground. ‘It’s Lucifer, the devil.’

But evil was the wrong word, thought Cal. It was more like a black hole, mindless, mechanical, devouring matter and light until there was nothing left. He didn’t say it, though, because it sounded so stupid.

Graham shook his head.

‘So you’re telling me you’re the good guys?’ he asked.

Cal thought of the police back at Hemmingway, dozens of them blown into ash. He looked out over the city, the pit that had been sunk into the middle of it – ten, fifteen miles wide and God only knew how deep – opened up in the battle between the angels and the storm. How many people had died as a result? A million? It hadn’t been their fault, but Schiller and Daisy and the new boy hadn’t exactly pulled their punches.

‘Yes,’ Daisy said. ‘We are.’

Graham seemed to chew on this for a moment, then he nodded. He put his phone to his ear, talking too quietly for Cal to listen.

‘Seriously,’ whined Brick. ‘It’s gone. It’s not our problem.’

Graham was shouting now, his cheeks red with anger.

‘This might be our only chance,’ the man said. ‘Are you willing to bet everything on that? General? General?’

He snapped the phone closed, pacing back and forth. He looked up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the ever-brightening sun.

‘Okay. We’ve got a problem. We’ve got to get underground. There’s a Tube station nearby, it’ll keep us safe until Hazmat get here.’

‘Safe from what?’ asked Daisy. ‘I don’t think the storm is coming back. I think we scared it.’

‘Not the storm,’ said Graham. ‘A nuke.’

‘A
what
?’ said Cal.

‘A tactical nuclear strike on the city. The main target was the storm, but they’re aiming at you guys too. They think you’re part of this.’

‘But why?’ said Daisy, pulling loose from Cal.

‘Because of what happened on the coast. You took out a whole town up there. It’s just gone.’

‘That wasn’t us,’ said Daisy. She looked at Rilke, shaking her head. ‘It was . . .  it was an accident. It wasn’t our fault.’

‘Not my call,’ he said. ‘It’s already been launched. We’ve got minutes. Come on.’

He set off back the way he’d come but nobody followed him.

‘What did you do, Rilke?’ Cal asked. ‘You killed a whole town?’ She didn’t reply, didn’t even seem to hear him. ‘Jesus.’

‘Leave her alone, Cal,’ said Daisy. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

‘Not her fault,’ said Brick. ‘She’s a psycho, or have you already forgotten? Leave her here, let the bitch get fried.’

‘I’m serious,’ said the man, looking back over his shoulder. ‘You can have this conversation when we’re underground, but if you don’t start moving then you’re all going to die.’

‘No,’ said Rilke. ‘We’re not.’

She stood slowly, running a hand down her top to brush away the blood and dirt that caked it. There was something in her eyes, something that burned. She turned to the man, then to Daisy.

‘Can you find it?’ she asked.

‘The storm?’ Daisy scuffed her feet in the dirt. She was missing a shoe, Cal noticed. ‘I don’t know. I think so. Why?’

‘Because I’m going to kill it,’ she said. ‘It’s going to die for what it did to my brother.’

‘Listen,’ said Graham. ‘If we don’t leave now we’re not going to make it.’

‘He’s right,’ said Brick, stumbling towards the man. ‘We should go with him.’

‘And then what?’ said Cal. ‘Hide? And what are you going to do when he starts trying to rip your face off?’

Brick stopped, uncertain. He swore, picking up a chunk of rock and lobbing it at the shell of a house.

‘We should go, we should do this,’ Cal said. ‘You saw what you did. You scared it.
Hurt
it, I think. Anything that can be hurt can die, right?’

‘I think so,’ said Daisy. ‘I think it ran because it knew we might kill it.’

‘Then let’s kill it,’ said Rilke. She walked to Daisy. ‘Take us to him.’

‘No way,’ said Brick. ‘You’re crazy.’

Something growled overhead, a distant peal of thunder. Cal’s heart seemed to forget what to do for an instant as he thought the man in the storm had returned. Then he realised it was something else, a plane maybe, or a missile. It grew louder, searing a path through the sky.

‘That’s it,’ said Graham. ‘Last chance.’

Rilke looked at Cal, her expression full of a savage fury. There was a question there, as clear as if she had spoken it.
Are you coming?
What choice did he really have? If they didn’t stand up to the storm then sooner or later the whole world would look like this. He nodded. Rilke turned to Marcus, who smiled weakly.

‘I’m in,’ he said.

‘Yeah, and me,’ said Howie. ‘We should finish this.’

They all turned to look at Brick, that rumble in the sky getting louder all the time. It wouldn’t need to reach the ground, Cal knew. It would be detonated over their heads where it would do the most damage. How long did they have? A minute? Five? Brick must have been thinking the same thing, because he spat out another curse.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Have it your way.’

‘You should go,’ Daisy said to the man. ‘Before it’s too late.’

‘What about you?’ he replied. ‘You need to get underground, somewhere safe.’

‘We’ll be okay,’ she said. She closed her eyes, the flames spreading slowly out from her chest, her wings unfolding like those of a waking swan. ‘Just tell them we’re on their side,’ she said, cold fire crawling up her neck. ‘Tell them we’re trying to help. And thank you for the warning.’

The inferno engulfed her, and when she opened her eyes it was as if they were portholes on the side of a burning ship. The air shook with the strength of her, that same mind-numbing hum, but behind it the growl of a plane grew louder.

‘You sure about this?’ asked Brick. ‘I mean, we could just—’

Daisy didn’t let him finish, just lifted her arms and pulled the world up over their heads. Cal’s stomach lurched. He saw Marcus vanish, then Adam, then Howie. Rilke too, with one final, heart-breaking glance at the body of her brother. The man, Graham, was pulled up alongside them. Even as they went something ignited overhead, a pure light that seemed even brighter than Daisy, a noiseless explosion that turned the sky silver. Cal saw the damage the nuke did as it blew up, a chain reaction that ripped things apart at their core. Would an angel have been able to stand up to that? Would they have lived if they hadn’t been warned?

Then there was nothing but the rush and tumble of the ether, and the awful knowledge of what awaited them on the other side.

This time, she kept her eyes open.

It was like when her dad used to make her fly, when she was a kid. He would hold her tight, his huge hands engulfing hers, then spin around in a tight circle, launching her up into the air. The first few times she’d screwed her eyes shut, too afraid to watch despite the thrill. But when she knew for sure he wasn’t going to let go, send her sailing off over the roof of their house, she would open them, see the world moving so fast it was just a blur – the only constant her dad’s grinning face as he turned with her. She was the moon to his gravity; she knew that however fast he went she would never pull free.

It wasn’t her dad keeping her locked tight now, it was her angel, and as she escaped from the world, shrugging off droplets of reality the way a dog shakes itself after a swim, she thought she almost saw it there. It was like the world was made of coloured sand, pulled apart by a hurricane. Even as she rose up and out of time – Cal and Brick and poor, lost Rilke and everyone else rising beside her – the landscape was scrubbed clean. The white light she had seen, the one that burned in the sky, brighter than the sun, brighter even than the angels, was a bomb, she realised. She peered into the very heart of it with her new eyes, saw the atoms colliding, the power that burst from each one as the reaction spread. The explosion reached for them, but – thanks to the nice man and his warning – they had already slipped through the cracks, stepped into a place where nothing, not even a nuclear blast, could ever hurt them. Gradually the light faded, the ruined city disappeared, leaving them hanging in an empty, quiet place.

Not for long, though. Soon enough she felt the fingers of reality digging into her ribs, into her tummy, the same way you feel gravity try to pull you back down. Life wanted them back, it didn’t like it when they found a way loose. She focused, keeping her eyes open – doing so seemed to slow the whole process down, giving her more time to think. There was nothing around her now but darkness, and yet it was a strange kind of darkness that was also light – she could see the others floating alongside her, as if they were all sinking into an ocean. They all had their eyes closed, but even if they hadn’t she didn’t think they’d have been able to see her.
It’s not the same for them,
she thought.
This is just a blink of the eye, a single beat of the heart.
It was funny watching them like this, as though they were asleep, and Daisy almost felt like laughing.

Until she felt it, a sudden loss.
Jade,
she thought, seeing the girl for an instant, in a forest, surrounded by soldiers. Then the crack of a gunshot and nothing.
I’m sorry,
she said, her angel once again numbing the sadness.

The world around her was vibrating, ever so slightly, just the smallest tickle in the air, in her skin. The tremor was growing stronger, though, more insistent. It was the universe, she realised; they were in danger of breaking it. The little wheels and cogs and spinning things of reality just weren’t designed to hold them here. What would happen if she resisted for much longer? Maybe time and space would simply close up behind her, shutting them out forever, locking them tight inside this pocket of nothingness. The thought frightened her, and she started to relax her mind, ready to let life reel her back in.

Only . . . something stopped her, another thought. She reached into her head, into her soul, to the thing that now lived there. It didn’t react, didn’t seem to notice her, which wasn’t surprising. These angels, they weren’t really angels at all, not the angels she’d been brought up to believe in. They were more like, like animals or something. No, more like
machines
. They didn’t know how to communicate, she thought. Maybe they didn’t know that communication was even a possibility. They were utterly single-minded, built for one purpose: to fight the man in the storm whenever and wherever he appeared. Everything else was alien to them, unknowable. They were programmed to defend life, and yet they didn’t even know the magic, the wonder, of what they were fighting for. If that was true, she thought, it was awful.

The vibrations around her were growing worse, making her teeth chatter even though she was pretty sure that here, in this place, she didn’t have teeth. The others were jiggling around where they hung in mid-air, looking like sheets left out to dry in a strong wind, their faces growing distorted and strange. Daisy relaxed her grip on the ether, letting herself slide back towards the world, only anchoring herself again when she felt something move inside her chest. The angel, was it trying to tell her something? Or was it just shifting around in there the way she would often shuffle when she was in a car on a long journey, trying to get comfy?

Tell me,
she asked it.
You can talk to me, I’m your friend. Tell me who you are, please.

Another itch inside her soul, a sensation that was painless but also unpleasant, as though she had feathers growing in the marrow of her bones. Was that how they spoke? Daisy felt like one of the ants that her dad had vacuumed up. For all she knew those little creatures may have been calling out, trying to talk to them. But how can an ant communicate with a human, and how could a human possibly communicate with an angel? It was impossible.

And yet there was suddenly a thought inside her head, a sensation. This was uncomfortable too, scratchy feathers bristling in the flesh of her brain, but she seemed to understand its translation. This place, this awful, empty, shaking, freezing, groaning place lost behind time, was home. This is where they lived, the angels, until they were called to fight, and this is where they returned once the war was over. There was no life, not here, no happiness or fun or family or friendship, just flashes of duty drowned in eons of nothingness.

Is that right?
she said, feeling like her insides had been scooped out and thrown away. The thought was too terrible, it was unbearable. But the angel said no more, not in a way she could understand.
You poor thing. You poor, lonely thing. I wish there was something I could do. I wish I could help you. You could stay with me forever if you want. I promise I’d never send you back here.

And as soon as she’d thought the words she wished she could take them back, because she didn’t mean it, not really. After this – if there was an after, if she survived and there was a world left to live in – she wanted to go back to her life, to . . . maybe not to her house, because that would be too sad. But there were others she could live with, her gran, maybe, or her mum’s sister Jane. At least she could try to be normal again, and after time who knew, maybe all this would seem like a distant memory, a dream even. She could go back to school and university and get married and have babies and just be normal, just be Daisy. But none of that would be possible if she had an angel inside her, if at any moment she could burst into flames and burn the planet to ash.

She pushed the thoughts away, hoping that the angel hadn’t heard her offer, or at least hadn’t understood it. Pulling the hooks of her mind from the world, she let herself fall, feeling her ears pop as the pressure changed. The others fell with her, those little blue flames burning in their chests. All except for Brick, that was. His flame had grown, spreading out across his shoulders and down towards his tummy.

He’s next,
Daisy thought as their descent increased, the roar of wind in her ears, the thunder of the fall making her bones rattle. She closed her eyes against the rush, doing her best not to scream. It was terrifying, and yet she felt something else, too, something different – excitement. It was such an odd feeling, next to the fear, that it took her a moment to understand that the sensation wasn’t hers. It belonged to the angel – the thrill of escape, of leaving this place, of being born once again into the world. Whatever it was inside her – alien or angel or some piece of timeless cosmic machinery designed to keep the world in balance – it was eager, it was keen, it wanted to be away from here.

As the tumble ended, the world reforming itself around her, Daisy wished once again that she hadn’t said what she’d said. Because what if, when all was said and done, the angel didn’t want to leave?