Broken Angels Read online

Darryl clenched his teeth and withstood the searing radiation as he made his way through the colorful storm, searching for a switch that would shut off the globe. He made it to the opening of the dark hallway, only to fall back again when one of the doors opened and—almost in a blur—a teenage girl spun out and into the hall, bounced off the walls, and kicked him in the face and stomach.

  Darryl was forced back against the edge of the pool table. He was preparing to push himself forward when the girl smacked him, twirled, kicked him in the knee, and whirled away, out of his reach, while he grunted and snatched at her.

  The girl grabbed a pool cue from the rack in the corner of the room as Darryl saw someone else coming out of the same hallway door. No time to determine the age, gender, or danger before he saw the more immediate threat—the girl swinging her cue down at his head.

  Darryl couldn’t duck. He could only try to catch the cue with his hand. He grunted when the wood smacked his palm. He made a much louder sound when the boy who’d emerged from the hallway’s door planted the tip of his steel-toed boot into Darryl’s chest with a swift kick.

  The boy and the girl shouted as if they were at a sporting event. Darryl suppressed a mild urge to shout for Robert’s help. Not today. And definitely not for two little brats.

  The boy drew his foot back for another kick. Darryl released the pool cue and lunged at him. Caught off-balance on one leg, the boy did little as Darryl pushed him, forcing his back against the corner where the room met the hallway. The boy screeched in pain. Darryl wanted to make him screech again, but he spent the next moment spinning to the left, out of the way of the stick-swinging girl.

  He stopped in the darkened, narrow hallway and stood facing the grimacing, sloe-eyed teenager who guarded its entrance. Over the girl’s shoulder, he saw the four punks from the TV room entering the poolroom. Apparently they’d all recovered at the same time, or maybe they’d waited until they were all rested and ready to jump their quarry at once. Whichever, he had to get back out there to help his partner. And he had to do something about this girl in front of him. As usual, time was not an ally.

  Darryl neither blinked nor saw the starting action, but he did see the reaction of the girl shouting in surprise and stumbling forward. She came one step into the hallway but was blocked from entering thanks to the size of the pool cue. It seemed Robert had come out from under the near side of the pool table and shoved the girl from behind before she could turn around to see him. Darryl didn’t hesitate to take advantage of her temporary disorientation.

  He drew some of the abundant light from the pool room into the hall, gathered it in his palm, and then forced it forward, straight at the girl’s face. She screamed at the impact and dropped her cue. She was infected all right; an attack like that would’ve inflicted temporary blindness on an uninfected person, but no pain. When the girl brought both hands up to her face, Darryl grabbed one of her arms and pulled her back into the hall with him. Before turning his back to the poolroom, he saw Robert had hopped on top of the table and was fending off the four punks surrounding it. Darryl would join him soon. First things first.

  He twisted the girl’s arms behind her and pushed her chest-first up against the wall, making sure her face was turned away from the bright playroom.

  “You want to be the one who cooperates and walks away relatively unharmed?” Darryl asked.

  Before she could say anything, the boy in battle boots got back to his feet and rushed at them. Darryl squinted and concentrated, hitting the boy in multiple spots on his face, neck, and arms with bundles of infrared radiation. The boy fell to the floor, burned and unconscious.

  “It won’t be him,” Darryl said. “Or the vermin who’re trying to hurt my friend out there. We’re going to take them down. Hard. Find out what secrets you-all’ve been hiding. You’re the only one who’s being given a choice.”

  “Get out of our fuckin’ house…” The girl managed one complete sentence between grunting and struggling.

  “You lose your right to being left alone when you go after others—”

  “Didn’t go after nothin’…You ’tacked us!”

  “Take precious property that doesn’t belong to you,” Darryl continued, “keeping children from their proper guardians—”

  “Our parents live here!”

  Her words surprised him, but before asking any questions about her story, Darryl needed to know the ending to another.

  “I’m not talking about you,” he said. “I want to know where the redhead is. Marie-Lydia. I also want to know what you people—”

  “Darryl!”

  “What fuckin’ redhead?” the girl said.

  He’d heard the shout. Robert needed him. Now. But he couldn’t let the girl go free. She’d attack him again, no question. He had no choice. She was at least sixteen, seventeen years old. Practically an adult. She could take it.

  “You had your chance.”

  Darryl put his hand on just the right spot of the girl’s neck and twisted his wrist. She collapsed, unconscious.

  Darryl rushed into the poolroom and assessed the situation. The four thugs still had the table surrounded. Three of them were armed with pool cues. The fourth—the self-stuck pig—was wielding the same large knife. Robert was holding his own, jumping from one spot on the table to the next, trying to avoid the rolling billiards and, with less success, trying to avoid the swinging sticks. He was clearly having trouble keeping his senses and balance under control while in the thick of all the colorful globs.

  An average person might regard the disco ball’s lightshow as a welcome or even necessary aid for dancing and partying, but to almost any victim of the Virus, the radiation-shower could be nothing less than plain torture. Robert wouldn’t last much longer. Darryl saw the tear in his pants and the gash underneath. He knew what had triggered Robert’s call for help. With no bow and no corresq, Darryl also needed help.

  He took a deep breath, pulled off his T-shirt, and entered the lightshow.

  As expected, Darryl’s hypersensitive bare skin reacted to the exposure. The parasites inhabiting the upper layers of his skin were thrown into frenzy. For them, it was feeding time. Darryl concentrated and did what he could to keep them under control, trying his best to stay conscious as he used every inch of bare skin to manipulate the radiation that was violating him. Indigo pools of liquid-light gathered in his pores as most of the hairs on his skin seemed to stiffen and self-ignite. It felt as if the hairs were burning themselves out and laying down the remains in the indigo pools, and from the mixture, from the pores emerged a glistening substance, a viscous perspiration that tingled and burned his skin as it changed the skin’s appearance, its texture, seeming to convert Darryl’s epidermis into a thin shell, even as that shell—he felt—began to crack.

  Despite the excruciating pain, Darryl was in control.

  He extended his hands and redirected a good portion of the light beaming down from the sphere above. As the spinning ball used the bits and pieces of the environment to produce confounding blobs of color, Darryl used the light to combine all of the amorphous blobs and then divide them, creating intangible puppets, allies that looked more-or-less like him and were alive enough to move at his direction and engage two of Robert’s attackers.

  Darryl manipulated his zombified beings of light toward the knife-wielder and the closest stick-swinger. The former was too obsessed with trying to draw blood to notice anything, but the man with the cue turned and swung twice at the projected hologram, without effect. Not being as stupid as he first appeared, the stick-swinger soon gave up on the puppet and went after the string-puller himself. The man color-shifted his appearance to blend into his surroundings and make himself harder to see. He too was a Virus-carrier, and before he got close enough to swing at Darryl, the man sent forth a burst of infrared radiation to burn and disorient him— successfully—seconds before tagging Darryl on the arm with the stiff wooden stick. Darryl hollered and lost the concentration to control his marionettes. He tr
ied to counterattack, but his sloppy punches only swept the air as the pool cue tagged him twice more. Darryl was facing an enemy he couldn’t quite see, but he did see Robert reach down, scoop up the nine-ball, and fastball it in his direction. The ball pegged the stick-swinger in the back of the head; he lost his camouflage as he fell face-forward. Darryl hit the man with an uppercut and didn’t wait to see him hit the floor; he rushed forward to take out the man with the knife.

  Darryl grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the blade and twisted it as violently as he could to make the man drop his weapon. He then grabbed the forearm that was inches away from the stabbed shoulder, brought it behind the man’s back, and jerked it up as he rammed the man’s forehead against the pool table’s edge.

  The odds were evened. Two against two.

  Darryl punched his chosen opponent into unconscious submission while Robert found his way off the table by hitting his attacker with a few billiard balls. On level ground with his enemy, Robert wrestled the man down to the floor and put him to sleep with an expertly applied hold. Darryl found the light switch to shut off the mirror ball.

  The two stood for a moment and surveyed their work, attempting to catch their breath before moving on.

  “Why didn’t the ones who attacked you in the garage come back?” Darryl asked. “You didn’t—”

  “Tied them up with a rubber hose,” Robert replied. “Just a man and a woman. Got them by surprise. Went down easy.”

  Darryl stepped back into the hallway; Robert was two steps behind him. He surveyed the room with the open door while Robert surveyed the room across from it.

  Darryl saw nothing but a bedroom oversupplied with electronic equipment, most of it still in boxes. Robert had found nothing but an empty bathroom.

  They moved on to the next door and found another bedroom, also messy with electronic equipment.

  Darryl twisted the knob on the door to the final room. It was locked.

  “Break it down?” Robert asked.

  “I’ve got it.” Darryl started fidgeting with his belt buckle. He pulled out what appeared to be a short metal pin and inserted it into the keyhole.

  “A key?” Robert asked.

  “A tool,” Darryl said. “Special metal. Ask Zel about it.”

  He jiggled the tool and the knob and, within seconds, the knob turned.

  Both agents tensed and readied themselves, prepared to face head-on whatever had holed itself up in the room.

  They weren’t prepared.

  There would’ve been no way to prepare themselves for the sight of the girl—in torn, burned, and blood-stained clothing—strapped to a bed surrounded by video equipment.

  She didn’t see them enter. She hadn’t seen anything for some time.

  Darryl saw she was asleep, in a deep sleep, but not dead. He recognized the girl as the same one from the videos, those all-too-popular videos recorded at a Spencer, Virginia high school and illegally available to those willing to visit, pay, look, and play in the pits of the blackest holes in cyberspace.

  Yes, the tip had been right, but something was all wrong. She didn’t have red hair. She wasn’t chubby. She was a few years older than the fifteen-year-old girl they thought they’d find.

  “She’s alive,” Darryl said.

  “But it’s the other girl,” Robert said. “Right movies, wrong star.”

  “Yeah. Contact The Burrow. Tell Adam what happened, and what we found. Get the proper authorities out here. Quick.”

  Robert touched the face of the watch on his right wrist as Darryl turned to walk back down the hall.

  The defeated remained motionless on the billiard room floor, but no telling when some of them could come to. Before tying them up, Darryl decided it would be a good idea to first check on the two Robert had secured. It was possible they could’ve gotten free or, worse, called for backup. Darryl wanted to make sure they were still down and out.

  Near the entranceway to the TV room, he noticed for the first time an odd smell. Probably the smell Robert had mentioned earlier, before the disco ball of pain had been switched on. Darryl looked around until his eyes stopped on the coat closet near the front door. He tried to see through the closet’s door, but couldn’t. He had to open it in order to find the decapitated woman, and the bound and gagged child in whose lap her head rested.

  THREE

  “Illiberal world—

  and still some manage to find freedom,

  but is it only in their heads?”

  Robert listened to these lyrics, sung in the most perfect way, as he studied the singer’s eyes, and lips, and throat. As much as he wanted to believe it, as much as he felt it, he wasn’t naïve enough to believe that unique voice was singing songs only for him. Without thinking about it, he picked up the knife.

  He weighed it in his hand for a while, and then dipped it into the glass.

  It was the same glass of grapefruit juice he’d ordered when he first came into the club, two hours ago. What was left had become too warm to drink, but he wasn’t even considering it. Only the movement, the motion…Stirring was his way of dancing to the performance piece of slow poetry and cool melodies.

  An admired artist was onstage, performing and testing snippets of a larger dramatic work she and her troupe had been developing. The crowd was small, but it didn’t matter. Many artists’ past experiences had shown, no matter how seemingly empty, this particular dawnclub always managed to have the right mix of people, a good cross-section comprising a fair and honest audience open to hearing new experimental music.

  Robert sometimes lacked the courage to be completely honest about what he saw and heard, even to himself. He usually preferred music without words, or in a foreign language, giving him the chance to provide his own lyrics in his mind. But Sin Limite, the multilingual singer on the stage, had been a favorite since junior high school. He’d discovered her during a pretty rough time. She was such a different type of vocalist; he put her in a special category. No matter what she said or how she said it, Robert valued every word. And he felt no shame in smiling and applauding at anything she did, even if it was simply making a brief appearance on stage to do nothing but raise her finger.

  At the moment, Robert saw someone else make an appearance. He didn’t wave or signal. He just shifted his eye and stared, waiting for his partner’s eyes to meet his. Darryl saw him. Robert turned his attention back to the attraction on the stage.

  Sin Limite had turned the song over to a chorus of five preteens. They and the jazz ensemble accompanying them were just one small part of the performance artist collective known as “Phantasie’s rEVEnge,” or “The Phantasie” to loyal fans. Even though he didn’t care for most of The Phantasie’s work, Robert followed Sin Limite. Keeping tabs on her latest projects, he knew The Phantasie as a whole was working on developing a multimedia production of The Blackbook of Autumn Numbers, a two-volume book of narrative dramatic poetry Robert considered to be little more than unburned trash. He still found it interesting the troupe was making an attempt to translate the book into a complete work of art. The singers, musicians, poets, dancers, and others who were members of The Phantasie were determined to dramatize the poems in the book, telling the book’s story using a connected series of performance pieces involving music, dramatic readings, dancing, interactive videos, and other types of experimental art, all of which would be presented as a coherent whole on the Internet some day.

  “Hey—” Darryl started to speak, but Robert held up his hand.

  “Wait till this piece is over,” he whispered.

  Sin Limite finished her song:

  “It goes against all sense—

  why do children love to play

  in the rain, begging for a later illness

  to take from their days of joy?

  I had an umbrella in hand,

  but it’s useless against what the wind carries.

  So I returned home

  to save it for a lighter day.”

  The crowd appl
auded as the singer waved and the group left the stage. A saxophonist was coming up next. Robert signaled to the bartender he was ready for another drink, and then he turned his full attention to Darryl. Darryl’s attention was on a blonde sitting at the bar.

  “Okay.” Robert touched his partner’s arm. “What’s up?”

  Darryl passed another smile to the striking beauty then frowned at his partner.

  “It was a band of identity thieves,” Darryl said. “A good one. Even the kids were involved. And the headless woman.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “No. They’d been making their living through financial fraud, using aliases. They’re wanted in five states. The good citizens of the Heartland Security Agency were pretty happy to finally get their hands on them, after we got our hands on them. They weren’t too happy about that part.”

  “So we got a little rough,” Robert said, “so what? We had no choice, and no backup. No Peacemaker agents to help us out—”

  “There was an incident at one of the hotels near Pentagon City,” Darryl said. “Three jihadists tried to take the whole building down. There weren’t any Peacemaker agents readily available.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know,” Robert said, then with a grin, “Funny. Most Americans think Muslims are the biggest threat to civilized, God-fearing society.”

  Darryl nodded. “No surprise you would find that funny.”

  “What about our identity thieves?” Robert asked. “Were they affiliated with The ID?”

  “The teenage girl and three of the guys are carriers. The rest were just regular punks and scum. No one’s sure yet of any affiliation with The Infinite Definite.”

  That would’ve been interesting. Identity thieves associated with The ID. Even though the abbreviation was an intentional nod to Freud and pronounced the same way as “id,” Robert always considered the concept of personal identities—shifting and lacking— when pondering how the terrorists operated. They were hard to identify, until they attacked. And once they’d left a bloody scene, despite the near ubiquity of HSA surveillance cameras, they were near impossible to track.