Armageddon’s Children

TWENTY-THREE

ANGEL PEREZ SHIFTED her gaze from the winding ribbon of roadway that stretched ahead to the slowly darkening sky and frowned in frustration.

"How much farther do we have to go?" she asked Ailie.

The tatterdemalion, an ethereal figure in the fading light, looked back over her shoulder and blinked. "Not far."

"It's starting to get dark. It will be night before long." Angel glanced around at the trees and deep shadows bracketing the road. "I don't much want to be caught out here when that happens."

She had lived in the city all her life and had an instinctive dislike of the country. They had been walking for several hours and hadn't seen a single building that wasn't either a shed or a barn. There were broad hills, broken–topped mountains, deep woods, roads that seemed to lead nowhere and not much else. No houses. No stores. Certainly no high–rises. It wasn't Los Angeles, and it wasn't familiar or comfortable. She was pretty sure they were still in California, but for all she knew they might have walked all the way to Canada.

"You said we would find a quicker way to get wherever it is we're going than by taking one of the trucks. I believed you."

"We will." The tatterdemalion didn't even look back this time. "Be patient."

Be patient, Angel thought in disgust. She had been patient for almost four hours and look where she was. She should have been more trusting, but she hadn't stayed alive this long by relying on trust. She did not think that the creature she followed meant her any harm, but all too often good intentions coupled with poor judgment was all it took. She knew nothing of Ailie's capabilities. In point of fact, she knew nothing about her at all. She was a Faerie creature sent by the Lady, but she would have a life span of not much more than sixty days, so her experience couldn't amount to much. That, all by itself, was troubling.

What was more troubling, physically speaking, were the wounds she had received in her battle with the demon. The claw marks down her back and along her shoulder burned like fire, and she was battered and bruised from head to foot. She needed to bathe and rest. She was unlikely to get a chance to do either anytime soon.

She kicked at the dirt of the road they were following. What was she doing out here anyway, not only out of the city, but away from anything familiar? Dios mia! Hunting for Elves? She didn't even believe in Elves. Well, she supposed that maybe she did, knowing that there were so many other kinds of Faerie creatures in the world. But still. Hunting for Elves? She should have gone with Helen and the children. She should have told Ailie that this wasn't for her.

After all, how did she even know that the Lady had sent Ailie? She only had Ailie's word for it. She had no way of knowing what was going on, what sort of game she might be a pawn in. How could she know what to believe?

Except that she did. She knew because her instincts told her what to believe and what not to believe, and it had very little to do with common sense or life experience.

She sighed, realizing she was being foolish. Most of what she did as a Knight of the Word required a suspension of disbelief and an acceptance that things you couldn't see were still there. You couldn't see the feeders, after all, unless you were a Faerie creature or a Knight of the Word. But they were there all the same, tracking after you, smelling you out, waiting for you to let your darker emotions gain control before they destroyed you. She had watched it happen to those who couldn't see them. Being unaware of their presence hadn't saved those people. So she might as well stop questioning the presence of Elves.

She might as well accept that most of what she thought she knew was only half right.

Nevertheless.

"Are we looking for something?" she asked Ailie with controlled exasperation.

The Faerie creature shook her head, her floating blue hair shimmering in what remained of the fading daylight. "It isn't far now, Angel."

It better not be, Angel thought. She tramped on, maintaining a sullen silence.

It was almost dark by the time they reached the storage complex. It sat near the intersection of the dirt road they had been following and a paved highway, well east of where they had started out. The sun had dropped behind the hills to the west, and the sky had turned gray and flat. Frequently there were glorious sunsets in the world, but not tonight. There was a lessening of color, but nothing more. Angel glanced west, thinking suddenly of Anaheim and the ruined compound, of how the fires and the smoke would be reflecting against the darkness, and then turned her attention to the storage complex.

She had seen others like it many times before. A series of low sheet–metal buildings fronted the highway, receding toward the trees in long rows. Most had been broken into and emptied of their contents, the remnants left strewn about the grounds in ragged heaps. Furniture, clothing, books, housewares–everything imaginable — tossed aside and abandoned. She found herself wondering what had been taken. In a world in which power sources were primitive and difficult to obtain, and in which transportation and commerce were essentially destroyed, what was left that would be worth stealing?

There was only one answer, of course. Weapons. Whatever else might happen in this postapocalyptic world, people would still continue to kill one another.

She caught up with Ailie. "This is it? This is what we've been trying to reach?"

Ailie looked back at her with the eyes and face of a child, her expression serene and nonjudgmental. Then she began moving through piles of junk toward the back of the complex. Angel hesitated, and then followed. She had come this far, after all.

When they were almost to the very rear of the complex, the tatterdemalion turned down a long row of emptied–out units and wove her way through the scattered contents until she reached the end unit. Like the others, the doors of this one stood open, locks broken and contents rifled. Angel glanced at Ailie questioningly. The tatterdemalion gave her a quick smile, then moved inside the unit to the very back wall, where a scattering of empty boxes lay piled up.

"Look, Angel," she said, pointing.

Angel peered into the gloom. She didn't see anything. Ailie beckoned her closer, gave a quick hand motion that illuminated the lower left corner of the wall, and now Angel saw a block lock set into the concrete of the floor, securing the wall in place. A door, Angel realized, disguised as a wall. Ailie smiled, moved over to the lock, and reached down and touched it. Instantly the lock clicked open and fell away. Ailie made another quick motion, and the entire wall slid up into a concealed compartment.

Angel peered inside and caught her breath. Two hulking, cloth–draped machines sat back in the shadows, one much bigger than the other, the wheels of each just visible where the coverings failed to reach the floor. Angel walked over, pulled off the coverings, and stepped back.

She was looking at a pair of triwheel ATVs. Big, sleek machines, they were capable of travel over any terrain and could reach speeds of sixty miles an hour on an open road. The smaller was a Mercury 5 series, the larger a Harley Crawler, either a Flex or Sim model. The Mercury was the quicker and more maneuverable of the two, the Harley the more indestructible. She hadn't seen either since her early days with Johnny.

"How did you find these?" she asked.

Ailie gave a small shrug. "We needed a way to travel north, and I looked until I found these. An owner who never came back for them hid them behind this false wall. They still have their power packs."

Angel walked over to the machines and checked the engine bays.

Sure enough, the heavy fuel cells were set in place, charged and ready for use. Three cells for each machine. Either one would take her a long way.

"Which do you want?" Ailie was smiling, her child's face mirroring an unexpected excitement. "I want to know how it feels to ride one."

Angel thought about it a moment, then walked over to the Mercury. Speed and agility. Better mileage for the cells because it was the lighter machine.

"This one."

She took removed the power cells from the Harley and hid them beneath a pile of debris several storage units down. She had learned never to leave behind anything an enemy might use against you. Then she wheeled the Mercury out into the open, inserted the first of the power cells, and fired it up. The engine caught instantly, emitting a sound that she thought might resemble the growl of a big cat. She climbed astride the padded seat and waited for Ailie to climb up behind her. She knew what to do. Johnny had taught her.

"Which way?" she asked.

Ailie pointed north up the paved crossroad.

Angel wheeled the Mercury through the debris of the storage yard and out the crumpled gates. As she reached the road, she caught sight of a figure standing back in the shadows to one side, underneath a massive old redwood. She peered at it intently, but the figure disappeared, and she found herself looking at a mailbox on a stake. She blinked, wondering what she had seen–wondering if she had been mistaken–and a memory of an earlier time abruptly resurfaced.

SHE IS LIVING on the streets of Los Angeles, still making her home in the barrio. Johnny has been dead three years now, and she is no longer a child. She is a young woman–much stronger and smarter, much more experienced. She has been tested many times since Johnny taught her how to defend herself, and his lessons have saved her each time. All who live in the neighborhood she calls her own know her by now; she is the one they look to for leadership and protection. She is feared and respected; she is a force to be reckoned with.

She walks the streets when she chooses, but never in a set pattern. She goes out both day and night, a soldier on patrol. Even the mutants keep their distance from her. They are not afraid of her; they are simply unwilling to put themselves in her path. The arrangement is simple; she leaves them alone and they leave her alone. A few, a reckless few, will test her limits from time to time. They will attack her people; they will pillage her stores. The results are always the same. She tracks them down and disposes of them.

Her life is full, but mostly pointless. She can never win the battle she is waging. There are too many of them, and only one of her. Still, it is all she knows and all she can think to do. So she continues.

Yet on this day, as she walks her streets–searching, watching, and waiting for the inevitable–she encounters someone she has never seen before. At first, she is not even sure what she is looking at. It appears to be a man, yet the edges are unclear and shimmer like something made of water disturbed. She does not look away, however; she continues to concentrate and, finally, the man takes on a definite shape.

Now she studies him closely. He stands in the shadows to one side between the buildings. He is big, but not threatening. She cannot explain why that is, but she feels it. She cannot make out his features, so she walks over to him to see what he will do. He does nothing. He stands where he is and waits for her.

"Angel of the streets," he greets her in a low, rumbling voice that comes from somewhere so deep down inside him that she cannot imagine how it climbs free. "Do you walk in shadows or in light this day?"

She smiles despite herself. "I always walk in light, amigo. Quien esta?"

He steps out of the shadows now, and she sees that he is Native American, his features blunt and strong, his skin copper, his hair jet black and braided.

He wears heavy boots and combat fatigues of a sort she has never seen, and the patches on his shoulders are of lightning bolts and crosses. One hand holds a long black staff carved with strange symbols from top to bottom.

His smile is warm. "I am called Two Bears, little Angel," he tells her.

"O'olish Amaneh, in the language of my people. I am Sinnissippi, but my people are all gone, dead now several hundred years. I am the last. So I try to make the most of my efforts."

She nods. "Is that what you are doing here?"

"In part. I arrived last night from other, less friendly places, searching for a place to hide. Those who hunt me are very persistent. They dislike the idea that there is only one of me. They would prefer that there be none."

"Los Angeles is not particularly friendly, amigo," she says, glancing around out of habit. "It may look it, but what lives here is only resting up for the next attack. There are Freaks of the worst sort. There are street gangs.

There are things I cannot even give names to. You might be better off in a smaller, quieter place."

"I might be," he agrees. "I will find out when I leave. But I need to speak with you first. I came to do that, as well."

She hides her surprise, wondering how he would even know of her. "As you wish. But we will not do so here. Are you hungry? Have you eaten today?"

He has not, and so they go to a place where she knows there is food to be salvaged, and they carry the packets to a small open square and sit on stone benches to eat while the sun, hot enough to melt iron, sinks slowly into the maze of buildings that lie between them and the ocean.

"Who hunts you?" she asks him after a few minutes of chewing in silence.

She regards him carefully. "Who would dare?"

He smiles at the compliment. "Many more than you would think. Mostly demons and the once–men in their service. Do you know of them?"

She does not, and so he tells her of the history of the Great Wars and of the source of the destruction that has changed life for all of them. He tells her of the Word and the Void and the battle they have waged since the beginning of time. He tells her of how life is a balance between good and evil, and how each is always attempting to tip the scales.

"Each side uses servants to aid its efforts. The Void uses demons, black soulless monsters that seek only to destroy. The Word uses its Knights, paladins sent to thwart the efforts of the demons. Once, they were mostly successful. But humans are an unpredictable, volatile species, and in the end they fell victim to their own excesses, fostered by the work of the Void's demons. They succumbed, and civilization succumbed with them."

She doesn't know if she believes him or not; certainly she thinks his story is as much fable as truth. But the way he tells it lends it the weight of truth, and she finds herself believing despite her reservations. His words provide an explanation she finds plausible for all the mad things that have happened to the world. She has always known that it is more than it seems, that the conflict between nations, between peoples, between beliefs, is augmented in a way she doesn't understand.

"I serve the Lady, who is the voice of the Word," he continues. "It is given to me to find a handful who will attempt to restore the balance once more.

For a long time, it wasn't possible; the madness and rage were too great to be overcome. But enough time has passed, and now there is a chance it can be done.

Are you interested in serving?"

She is caught off guard by his question, and she stares at him in surprise. "My place is here, with my people," she answers.

"Your people are no longer confined to a small part of a large city," he tells her. "Your people are the people of the world, near and far. If you would make a difference, you must look beyond your own neighborhood. A balance restored in one small place is not enough to change anything. In the end, it will fail and become a pan of the larger madness. It will be consumed."

She knows this is so. She has been feeling it for some time. She fights a losing battle because the larger world continues to encroach. But she is afraid to lose even this; it is all she has left.

"What is it you want me to do?" she asks finally.

The big man leans forward. "It is the Lady who seeks your help. She would have you become a Knight of the Word. She would have you enter into her service and give over your life to restoring the balance. She would have you do battle against the demons and their minions, against the evil they inflict. She would give you this."

He lifts up the black staff, which has been resting against the bench beside him. She has forgotten about it since she first saw him holding it. Now she looks at it closely, sees how deep and pervasive are the carvings on its surface, how they dominate the sheen of its polished wood. She has never seen anything like the staff. It attracts her in a way she thought nothing ever could again. When he holds it out to her, she takes it from him because she thinks that maybe it belongs to her.

'You are to keep it with you always. It is your sword and shield. It will protect you from the things that you hunt and that, in turn, hunt you. It is a talisman of powerful magic. Nothing can stand against it. But its power is finite; it is directly dependent on your own strength. Grow tired, and it will grow tired, too. Grow careless or lose heart, and you will be at risk even with the staff."

"What does it do?" she asks him.

"You will discover that when you use it. You will know instinctively."

She is still not decided about whether she will agree, but then he tells her of the slave camps, of the raids that have already begun on the compounds, and of the fate of humans who are taken captive, and she makes her choice. When he leaves her, she is holding the staff, her new life still only a faint glimmer on the horizon of her understanding, a mystery she will have to unravel one day at a time.

She watches him walk away from her until he is standing in the shadows between the buildings where he first appeared to her, a big, motionless presence. Then a noise catches her attention, and she glances toward the sound out of reflex.

When she turns back again, he is gone. Something in the way he has disappeared–the quickness of it, perhaps–makes it feel as if he was never really there.

IT WAS NEARING midnight when Delloreen reached the storage complex and began a slow search of the pillaged units. She had tracked the woman Knight of the Word all the way from Anaheim, from the hotel lobby where she'd nearly had her, from the ruins of the city to the countryside north, a slow and arduous hunt. It had been difficult to do this, but not impossible. Delloreen could track anything that gave off a scent. She was blessed with animal instincts and habits, with feral abilities that gave her an advantage over others. Demons were humans made over, but she had always been more animal than human.

So when she pulled herself clear of the hotel rubble and began her hunt, she used her nose to smell out her quarry's scent, to find it amid all the others, to taste it, memorize it, and then follow after it. It was easy enough, even mixed in as it was with all the other scents. Hers was a distinctive scent, a Knight of the Word's peculiar scent, recognizable by a demon with Delloreen's

abilities, there for the discovering if you knew how to look. Delloreen tracked her all the way to the camp, to where she had met the humans fleeing Findo Gask and his army, and then lost the scent. But after circling about, she had found it again, a solitary trail that meandered off into the woods.

The woman Knight had met someone there, deep in the trees. She was able to tell that much, even though she was unable to tell much else. Whoever the Knight had met had left no scent, no tracks, and no readable traces–nothing that would provide an identity. In the end, Delloreen concluded that it was a Faerie creature and that something of importance had taken place, since it had drawn the woman Knight away from the children.

Delloreen had tracked her down the dirt road to the paved crossroad and the storage facility. The trail went into the facility and ended. There were machine smells everywhere, raw and rank and difficult to sort through. Her quarry's scent disappeared in those. The demon ran up and down the paved road like a wolf, sniffing the ground, searching for tracks. She circled the entire complex twice, hunting carefully. But she found no trace of the woman Knight.

She went back into the complex and began to prowl through the units. Down on all fours, she worked her way along each row, through the discarded contents, in and out of the units, across the grounds and back again. Now and then, she caught a trace of the woman Knight's scent, but not enough of it to determine where she had gone. Another hunter might have given up, but Delloreen was relentless. The harder the search, the more satisfying the death that would signal its end. She was driven by thoughts of how that death would play itself out, how the woman Knight of the Word would be brought down, how she would beg for mercy, how she would gasp out her life.

When she smiled, her pointed teeth gleamed and her muzzle showed red. She flexed her claws and ran them softly over her scaly body. So sweet it would be when it happened.

It took her almost an hour to reach the units in the back and to discover the one with the false wall. The Knight had been so confident–or perhaps so hasty–that she had not bothered to close it up again. Delloreen read the absence of the ATV the woman had taken from marks on the floor. The reason for the intensity of the machine smells was revealed; her quarry had ridden the ATV out of here. But the machine left a distinct smell, one as easily recognizable as the woman Knight's own scent. It would be easy enough to track it if she left now and traveled quickly. Easy enough if she could match the other's speed and exceed her stamina.

But she would need a vehicle, something that would convey her as swiftly and surely as the woman Knight was conveyed.

She looked at the huge Harley Crawler sitting back in the shadows. She checked the engine bay and found it empty, but she caught a whiff of her quarry's scent and tracked it to where she had hidden the power cells. She carried the cells back, slipped them in place, and fired up the Harley's big engine. It caught with a roar that shook her to her bones.

She smiled as the vibrations filled her.

It would do.