World After (18 page)

S
POTLIGHTS
BLAZE
along the buildings, lighting up the walkway as we trudge onto the island. Everywhere I look, I see stone and concrete. Peeling paint and rust stains drip down the walls of the nearest building.

Four scorpions work near a shipping container that has a chain mesh gate like the one on the mainland.

They grab glossy entrails and body parts from buckets and toss them onto the concrete. The gore lands just out of reach of the trapped humans in the metal container.

The stench is unbearable. These people have been trapped in that cage for way longer than I want to know. I can tell not just by their stench but also by the fact that they are stretching their emaciated arms to try to grab the entrails and chopped-up body parts just out of their reach.

These people make sobbing, groaning noises. Nothing aggressive, just desperate. Their arms are too skinny, like they’re already dead but don’t quite realize it yet.

They can’t be meant to be turned into new monsters or even to be fed to them. They’re too abused, too underfed. How hungry would you have to be to reach out for raw, chopped body parts?

“Stupid as dirt in so many ways,” says a familiar voice. “But they still have the devious, twisted instincts of humans.”

It’s Beliel, the demon. His stolen white wings spread out behind him, a heavenly backdrop to his oversized body. He stands behind the scorpions who are tossing the chopped-up gore that’s plopping onto the ground.

A heart gets tossed onto a broken board, snagging on a giant splinter.

Beside Beliel stands an angel whose toffee-colored hair and gray feathers are windblown. He wears a light gray suit that quietly conveys taste and elegance.

Even without his trophy girls, I recognize Archangel Uriel, the politician. He’s the one who secretly orchestrated Raffe’s wing switch to keep him from being a competitive candidate in the upcoming angels’ election. As if that wasn’t enough to make me despise him, he likes to walk around with matching girls who are terrified of him.

“Are you referring to the locusts or their toys?” Uriel’s wings spread out partially behind him like a body halo. In the soft light of the aerie hotel, his feathers looked off-white with a touch of gray, but now in the harsh light of the utility lights, his wings look gray with a touch of midnight.

Locusts?

“The locusts,” says Beliel. “The humans are stupid as rocks, too. But they’re too tortured to use instinctive ingenuity. The locusts thought this game up themselves, you know. I was impressed. As devious as any demon from hell.” He sounds almost proud.

He must mean the scorpion monsters. I always imagined locusts to look like grasshoppers, not scorpions, so I don’t know why he calls them that.

“You’re sure the ones you trained will teach the others?”

“Who can tell, eh? Their judgment is clouded, their brains have shrunk, they’re probably insane from the metamorphosis. Hard to predict what they’ll do, but this batch did get extra
attention and do seem more capable than the rest. They’re as close to a leader group as you’ll get.”

A scorpion with a white streak in its hair gets tired of the game and walks up to the container of humans. The forest of skeletal arms withdraws back through the chain mesh. The captives’ feet scrape the metal floor as they shuffle away from the monster.

The scorpion stands tall in front of the dim interior. Then he tosses a bit of gore into the cage.

The night is instantly filled with metallic scuffling, animal grunting, and half-screams of frustration and desperation.

The people inside are fighting each other for the bloody scraps. For all I know, it could have been one of their own who got dragged out and turned into torture bait.

“See what I mean?” Beliel sounds like a proud papa.

I pick up my pace, wanting to get past the container as soon as possible. But the others move at the same speed, careful not to draw attention to themselves.

My arm is clamped in a viciously tight grip and I’m yanked so hard that my neck feels like it’s about to snap. A scorpion with greasy hair dripping down to its shoulders pulls me out of the herd.

The white-streaked one who threw the body parts to the prisoners looks at me, interest lighting its face. It walks over to me.

Up close, its shoulders and thighs are massive. It grabs me out of the first scorpion’s grasp and drags me behind it, holding both my wrists in one hand.

It’s headed for the torture container with its desperate victims.

Skeletal arms reach through the metal mesh with their unnaturally long fingers.

I can’t get enough air into my lungs and what I do manage to breathe in makes me gag. The stench up close is ferocious.

I skid on something lumpy and slippery, but the monster’s grip is so tight that I stay upright.

My heart has practically stopped with the realization that I won’t be going up to the stone building, but instead, will be joining the tortured victims.

I drag my feet and resist. I struggle, trying to loosen one of the monster’s hands. But I’m no match for its strength.

A couple of steps before the opening, the scorpion throws me up against the metal mesh.

I slam into it, grabbing the chains to keep myself upright.

The second I hit, the darker shadows in the back of the box scuffle toward me.

Hunched with sharp angles accentuating arms and legs, rags dragging on the floor, they shove each other out of the way to reach me as fast as they can.

A scream tears from my mouth as I frantically push myself back.

Arms reach out like a forest of bones sprouting through the chain mesh.

They grab my hair, my face, my clothes.

I thrash and scream, trying not to see their skeletal faces, their mangy hair, their bloodied nails.

I twist and yank, desperate to get out of their grasp. There are a lot of them, but they’re weak, barely standing on their feet as I pull away.

White Streak makes a series of screechy noises that sound suspiciously like a laugh. It thinks this is funny.

It grabs me and drags me toward the stream of people coming from the ferry.

It never intended to dump me into the torture bin. It just wanted to tease the prisoners and, I guess, me.

I’ve never looked forward to killing anything before. But I’m certainly looking forward to killing this one.

W
E
WALK
UP
the paved path toward the main building, which sits at the top of the island. Above us, swarms of scorpions
fly in what looks like massive chaos. There are so many of them, they actually create wind that blows in unnaturally changing directions. I know from what I saw earlier that there’s a practice pattern to their flight, but from here, it looks and feels as if we’re in the middle of a giant insect’s nest.

There’s not a regular angel in sight. This can’t be their new aerie. From what I’ve seen, angels prefer the finer things in life, and Alcatraz isn’t exactly a high-class resort. This must be some kind of human processing center.

I look around to see how Clara and Mom are doing. Clara is easy to spot with her jerky skin and shriveled body but my mother is nowhere to be found. When Clara sees me searching, she looks around too, seemingly surprised to find that my mom is not beside her.

No one seems to be looking for a missing prisoner. I’m not sure if this is good or bad.

I can’t hear a thing beyond the insect buzzing of the scorpion wings, but our guards make it clear where they want us to go. We climb toward the stone building on the giant rock that is Alcatraz, following the path walked by so many prisoners of the past.

The weird wind whipsaws my hair all around my head, reflecting what I feel inside.

O
NCE
WE
enter the building, the noise and wind quiet down. Instead, there’s a low moan that echoes off the walls. Not just the moan of one person but the collective moans of a building full of people.

I am in hell.

I’ve heard about the horrid conditions of some foreign prisons, places where human rights are a distant dream seen only on television or read about by university students. What I didn’t realize is that the guards, the awful conditions, and being trapped are only part of the hell.

The rest of it is in your head. The stuff you imagine about the screams you hear from parts unknown. The image you make up of the face of the woman who cries non-stop a few cells from you. The story you piece together incorporating the gurgling, clanging, and the high-pitched sound of what can only be some kind of electric sawing.

We’re crammed into old prison cells decorated with rust and streaky paint. Only, they don’t hold one or two of us per cell the way they were designed to. It’s standing room only.

Good thing the cot takes up space, otherwise, the scorpions probably would have crushed more of us in here. As it is, a few of
us can sit on the cot at a time, which lets the injured take a break and will come in handy when we’re calm enough to rotate for sleep.

As if this place isn’t hellish enough, an alarm goes off at random intervals, echoing through the building and putting us all on edge. Also, every few hours, a group of us gets marched down the hallway, which is even more nerve-wracking.

No one seems to know what happens to those who are taken away, but none of them come back. The guards who escort these groups are a couple of humans with a couple of scorpions as backup. The human guards are stoic and talk as little as possible, which makes them even scarier.

Over these fear cycles, I lose track of time as I doze in and out. I don’t know if we’ve been here for hours or days.

When a door clanks, we know another group is leaving.

As they march past us, I recognize a few of the faces. One is the father who was separated from his son. His eyes search frantically for his boy among those of us left behind bars. When he finds him, tears stream down his face.

The boy is in the cell across from mine. The other prisoners gather around him as he shakes with tears, watching his father march away from him.

One of the men starts to sing “Amazing Grace” in a beautiful, deep baritone. It’s a song whose words many of us don’t know, including me, but we all recognize it in our hearts. I hum along with everyone else as the doomed group walks past us.

C
IGARETTES
.
Who knew they’d be such a problem at the end of the world?

There are a few smokers in our cell, and one of them passed them around. We’re jammed together so no matter how hard the smokers try, they can’t help but blow into someone’s face. In California, you might as well spit on someone as blow smoke on them.

“Seriously, can you please put that out?” a guy asks. “Don’t you think it’s bad enough in here without you polluting the air?”

“Sorry. If there was ever a time when I needed a cigarette, this is it.” The woman squashes out her cigarette against the wall. “A double latte sounds great too.”

Two other prisoners continue smoking. One of them has tattoos on his shoulders and along his arms. The designs are intricate and colorful and were clearly done in the World Before.

There were gangs here in the Bay Area before the angels came. Not many and they stayed in their small territories, but they were here. They’re probably the reason the street gangs grew so fast. They were already organized and established. They were the first to take over the stores and then they started recruiting.

My bet is that this guy was one of the original gang members. He gives off an air of the ‘hood that Silicon Valley engineers just can’t copy, regardless of what they’ve done on the streets in the past couple of months.

“What you worried about, vegan boy?” asks Mr. Tattoo. “Lung cancer?” He leans over to the other guy and fake-coughs in his face, exploding smoke all over him.

Everybody tenses up. People shift out of his way, but they can’t get far. We’re trapped so closely that if there’s a fight, we’re all going down. It’d be like being caught in a blender. No matter what you do, you can’t help but get sucked in.

As if the tension isn’t thick enough, the alarm goes off again, scraping our nerves.

You’d think that if there was a real gang member in the group, everyone else would back off. But you’d be wrong.

The valley isn’t just filled with mild-mannered, smart engineers. According to my dad, who was once a mild-mannered engineer before he became the most educated convenience store clerk around, the valley is peppered with high-risk, high-octane CEOs and venture capitalists with mega-alpha personalities.
Movers and shakers. Entrepreneurs on speed. The kind that the President of the United States came to visit for dinner.

Now, we live in a world where those Ivy-league-educated mega-alphas are jammed up behind bars with the likes of street-schooled gang members like Mr. Tattoo, arguing over who has the right to smoke. Welcome to the World After.

Mr. Alpha is a big, blond, thirty-something guy who probably worked out regularly back when gyms were worth visiting. I’ll bet he has a charming smile when he wants, but right now, he looks like his nerves have been stretched about a foot farther than they can go, and the only thing keeping him from breaking is his sheer willpower.