}}}Kaitlyn. 2013. Los Angeles, California. 405 South, from Inglewood to Long Beach.}}}}}}}}}
“Okay,” Jackie said. “That’s a bunch of crazy bullshit. Thank you for sharing.”
“It may be,” Zang said. “I was not present to account for it. This is what the Empty Ones believe. This is what they strive for. But the ritual is real. Everyone in this vehicle can account for that.”
A small, stone church in a walled compound at the base of dark mountains. A burning light, jarring static, white space …
“So what does that have to do with now?” I asked.
“They’re doing another ritual tonight,” Carey said. “Poor son of a bitch is probably already going through the ringer.”
“The chase would be on right now, yes,” Zang said.
“Once he’s all done up to their liking,” Carey said, “an angel will turn up to put its celestial dick in his ear—”
“The angels do not have genitals,” Zang corrected.
“Figure of speech,” Carey said.
“Those are difficult.” Zang nodded.
“And that’s when you do your angel-murder thing. If your uh … vision … is real, then that’s the end of all this stuff. But hey, even if you’re wrong…”
“You will still kill an angel, and all of the Empty Ones around it,” Zang finished. “Jie will be running tonight’s ritual. I will see her dead.”
“But why are you doing this?” Jackie asked. “Nobody finds that weird? This fucking thing starts ranting about how perfect and beautiful the angels are, and how disgusting people are, and nobody thinks ‘oh shit, this guy is probably leading us into a trap’? Seriously?”
“If I wanted you dead I could steer this car into oncoming traffic. It would not matter to me,” Zang said, his voice as barren as a desert. “But I do not want that. Jie and I are connected. The angels created us together. They made a mistake. The thing I am cannot help but worship them. The thing I used to be remembers what they took away, and cannot forgive it. And Jie…”
There was genuine longing in that pause. A dusty, nostalgic kind of regret, like an old man looking at a picture of his wife, back when she was young.…
“Jie should not continue like she is,” Zang said. “She wouldn’t want that. She doesn’t deserve it.”
We all allowed him a moment of silence.
“And what’s Costa Suburbia?” I asked, when I thought enough time had passed.
“So-ber-bia,” Carey corrected. “It’s a subdivision they built back in the seventies. Supposed to be real high class shit. Where the families of studio heads could live safely, without ever being in danger of seeing a Mexican that wasn’t mowing their lawn. Built it right on the beach on top of these gigantic cliffs. Then a big one hit in seventy-one, and the whole thing collapsed. Didn’t even get to finish construction. The earthquake broke the cliffs clean off, and sent the whole neighborhood a couple hundred feet down into the ocean.”
“So we’re going scuba diving?” I said.
“No, most of it still sticks up above the water at low tide.”
“Jesus, these guys sure do love their dramatic set pieces.” Jackie laughed.
I smiled at her. She returned to staring out the window.
“It is not for dramatic effect,” Zang said. “The place is abandoned. The ritual draws much attention. There is often screaming. Bloodshed. Then the angel comes…”
“Lights up the joint like a million-watt spotlight,” Carey finished.
Every hour is rush hour for about an hour in every direction of Los Angeles. That sucks at the best of times, but try sitting in a stolen SUV with an old, smelly, homeless punk, a girl who blames you for the death of her parents, and a psychotic immortal who’s mostly preoccupied with driving and growing back his face. The silence was beyond awkward.
Carey spun the radio dial back and forth, scoffing and swearing at every single radio station before settling on NPR. They had some old punk guy from back in the day talking about how he’s doing this spoken word stuff now. Carey kept making wanking hand gestures and giving the radio the bird, but he didn’t change the station. In the pauses between segments, I could hear the soft squick of Zang’s flesh melding back together. It was a relief when he finally jerked the truck to a stop in an empty, cracked, and weed-strewn cul-de-sac overlooking the sea. Jackie yelled at him for the teeth-rattling stop, but he started droning on about “ceasing momentum in the most efficient way,” so she just stepped out of the car and slammed the door. I followed.
The sky and the ocean were the same color, separated by a thin shimmering band where the ghost of the sun still lingered. I could hear waves far below, their echoes confused by the furrowed stone of the cliffs. There was a hidden architecture down there somewhere—half-glimpsed hard angles, flashes of white tile—but I couldn’t make out details. The sun had barely set, but it was midnight in the cove below. It must be shadows from the cliffs, I told myself.
I wasn’t terribly convincing.
Carey and Zang took turns spitting off the cliff, then argued about who managed the greater distance. I stood upwind of them, for obvious reasons. Jackie was alone, huddled on the farthest outcrop she could find. She hugged her bare shoulders and shivered, her short brown hair whipping in the wind.
You should go talk to her.
She’s gotta calm down eventually. You’ll both put this behind you, and it’ll all be like it was.
You just have to take the first step.
Be the bigger person.
Say something.
“We should go,” I said. “If we’re going.”
I turned away from Jackie and started picking my way down the path. That was a generous description: It was a slippery, sandy animal trail, tracing the line of least resistance across unstable boulders and shimmying along crumbling cliffsides without much consideration to such paltry human concerns as “safety” and “terror.”
“Stop,” Zang said.
He grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me straight off my feet. I flew backward and landed on my tailbone in the dirt.
“What the hell?” I yelped.
“My bad,” he said, and gave me a goofy teenage smirk. Then it dropped away, and he continued tonelessly. “Working these bodies is difficult. I meant you no harm. I should go first on the path. I can see better at night, and sudden falls will not harm me. You are valuable tonight. You cannot be risked.”
He turned and started off without another word. Carey shrugged at me before disappearing over the precipice himself. Jackie went next. I got up and brushed the dust from my butt. Picked a few pieces of gravel from my elbows. Then I followed them down. I tried not to dwell on the implications of that word: “tonight.”
The trail started out dangerous and then graduated into a slow-motion suicide attempt. You could actually see where each type of hiker realized this was an idiotic venture, and turned back: The path was most worn right up to the edge of the cliff, where everybody with a functioning brain took one look at the crumbling goat trail and its several-hundred-foot drop onto jagged rocks and crashing waves, and decided that the mall sounded like a better weekend outing, after all. The more confident hikers ventured over the lip and onto the thin, deceptively slippery sand before turning back. The daredevils made it all the way down to the first switchback, where they likely took a few danger selfies so they’d have something to post on Facebook besides their lunch orders and cute pets. The tracks all but faded after the turn, dissipating into a scant few dares from drunken teenagers and a handful of reconsidered suicides.
We had past that point an hour ago.
But we weren’t even afforded the weak comfort of isolation. After a particularly difficult section—Zang had to straddle a gap where the trail either crumbled away, or else never existed in the first place, and then serve as a kind of human bridge for us—I fell to my knees and gripped the reedy, windswept grass like safety handles built into the earth. Beneath my clenched fists full of straw, I saw fresh footprints. Not enough to trample us a clear and usable path. Just enough to remind us that we weren’t fording this ridiculously dangerous trail to reach some untouched nature reserve, where we would take dumpy vacation photos and then laugh about our near-death experiences with the other insufferable expats back at the hostel; we were descending into a den full of monsters. Falling to our deaths on the way there would be our best-case scenario.
I couldn’t see the sunken city from the path. I could barely see the ground beneath my feet, during those few times I could pull my fear-paralyzed eyes away from them. The city was somewhere below or behind us, looming in my mind like a haunted house in a horror flick. I envisioned us rounding the cliff side into a dramatic fog break, the mist parting to unfold an ornate tapestry of broken towers and mossy brick.
In actuality, we hopped down a series of descending boulders, placed just too far apart to take them like stairs, and when I looked up, we were there. Standing in a sandy inlet tucked behind an outcropping of rock. The waves broke against the far side, leaving us with a small, but relatively peaceful little beach. A trail of gravel chased the cliff-base back into the darkened bay. The waves boomed back there, too, echoing across the rocks like terrestrial thunder. Zang allowed us a paltry few minutes to catch our breath, but you could tell he wasn’t happy about it.
Carey leaned upright against the rocks, trying to play off his exhaustion with an apathetic James Dean slouch, but his legs were shaking and his face was drenched in sour sweat. Jackie sat cross-legged at the edge of the shore, slumped, shivering, and silent. I was mentally exhausted—my adrenal glands having been burnt out hours ago by the rapid-fire near-death experiences—but I looked for tiredness in my muscles and found none. I flexed my fingers. They didn’t ache, like they should. They weren’t scraped and bleeding, barely able to close into a fist. They felt strong. Even my extra pinky, which up until recently I hadn’t been able to move much at all, now clenched and unclenched easily.
I’m no stranger to physicality. I made a living pretending to be action heroines. And I’ve even done some climbing—nothing serious, just for fun—so it makes sense that, after that trek, I would be in better shape than an elderly hobo who drinks Pabst for dinner, and a girl who thinks eating ice counts as exercise because it takes more calories to chew than it’s got. But I shouldn’t be this well off. I shouldn’t be at the top of my game. I shouldn’t be spoiling for a fight.
But Christ, I am.
“Do you need rest?” Zang asked, his voice flat. He stared into the dark.
I made a noncommittal noise.
“You should be tired,” he said. “They are tired.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I said you should be tired.”
I squinted at him in the half-light. He gazed unblinking at the black curtain that hung across the bay like smog. Like there was some poisonous factory in there churning out shadow as pollutant.
“How many have you taken?” he asked, still not sparing me a glance.
“How many what?” I started, by reflex, but I thought better of it. I knew what he meant.
Why play coy with the monster? The monster knows its own.
“Two,” I said. “I’ve killed two angels. This will be the third.”
“Good,” he said. “That means you’ll be strong and slow to injure, but will not yet turn on us.”
“Turn on you?”
Zang blinked and slowly adopted his human mask. It looked painful, watching that smile carve itself into his flesh.
“I’m just fuckin’ with you!” he finally said, and laughed. He nodded to Carey. “You guys ready to roll?”
“As I’m going to be,” Carey said.
He seemed to have trouble pushing himself upright. His knees crackled when they took his weight. Jackie said nothing. She just stood and faced us, quietly awaiting the next order.
“Follow behind me closely,” Zang said. “When I pause it means the footing has become dangerous. Grab my hand and I will guide you. Make little noise. They are not vigilant, but they are not entirely oblivious.”
“They?” I said.
“The Unnoticeables that live here,” he said.
“How many?” Jackie said. Her voice was like steel.
“Only ten that I can see,” Zang said. “But they are not the ones to worry about. Jie takes too much from her followers. She does not leave them enough to function like normal humans, and we should be able to avoid their attention.”
“So what should we worry about?” I said.
“The tar men,” Zang said. “I cannot see any now, but even my vision is not keen enough to pick them out in the dark. They will be here. And they will be quiet. And they will be nearly invisible until they are upon us.”
“What do we do then?” Jackie asked.
“You will probably die,” Zang answered. “That is why you should make very little noise. Let’s go.”
He took a step and disappeared into the dark. We followed.