}}}Carey. 1983. Los Angeles, California. South Gate.}}}}}}}}}
“Heads up!” Rosa laughed, and tossed me the severed head.
I laughed with her, but it was pretty forced. Both because it was kind of a corny joke, and also because the head was still snapping at me. I juggled it like a hot potato, trying to keep the snatching jaws away from my fingers. When I finally got the head settled, she glared at me with piercing blue eyes. She was trying to say something, probably about my mother, going by the hateful expression, but seeing as she was at least temporarily parted from her lungs, the words came out as barely a whisper. I sure as hell couldn’t make out what she was trying to say over all the screaming.
Rosa had one Unnoticeable in a headlock and another beneath her knee, pinning him to the concrete. There really didn’t seem to be much fight left in them, not since we’d killed the angel. A few seconds after the ball of light first blinked into existence, Rosa kicked opened the flimsy steel doors of the tool cabinet we’d been hiding in, jogged over and hopped right into the shrieking spotlight like she was cannonballing into a kiddie pool. She made it look so easy. Well, hell, in all fairness it was pretty easy these days. Had been ever since we’d taken her first angel in the ballroom of that boarded-up hotel.
Damn, but you wouldn’t recognize this chick as the same one me and Zang scared half to death in her apartment. It’s hilarious now, to think of her all meek on her kitchen floor, like “please don’t rape me.” Now she held sparring sessions with Zang and dismantled him like your little sister’s Barbie doll. If I so much as thought of mouthing off to her, I only had to rub the scar on my back where she dislocated my shoulder to give it another think. She took to the life like a lonely dog to a leg, but it took forever for her to believe us.
See, I’m of the opinion that once you see one impossible thing, you gotta consider that everything else could be possible. After I saw my first angel, looking like a cigarette burn in the film print of reality, shimmering with planes and angles that bent your mind, making a sound like an ocean of screams—well, ever since that night I pretty much accepted anything as a possibility. If you ran up to me on the street tomorrow and told me a gang of leprechauns was chasing you, the first thing I’d do is laugh. Then I’d start lacing up my boots in preparation for some magical-midget-stomping.
Not Rosa, though. We showed her Zang with his neck broken in half and still dancing around like a goober, and she believed that he was something supernatural, sure. But that was it. She had to be shown every little thing—the people whose faces fade away the closer you look at them, the other Empty Ones walking among us—we practically had to feed her to a tar man before she believed in those. Shoulda seen her face when her first angel popped in about three feet above the soggy, rotting floorboards of The Senator Hotel. Me and Zang, we had to throw her into the angel when the time came. No shit: I held her legs. We did the ol’ heave-ho. We were supposed to let go on three, but I was late. She disappeared into the shrieking white void ass-first.
Took her days to recover from angel number one, but ever since she opened her eyes, she’s been the fucking Tasmanian Devil. I thought Meryll was strong, but Rosa could pick up a damn car. A small one. Well, at least the back half, anyway. Look, she ripped this chick’s head straight off with her bare hands, and that’s enough for me. Oh, speaking of—one second.
I dropped the head to the cement and kicked it away. No idea if that was the right thing—did Rosa toss it at me just to fuck with me, or was I supposed to do something? But at least it wasn’t looking at me with those accusing eyes anymore.
We thought we’d find Jie here, in this run-down fur storage warehouse just outside Koreatown. There were plenty of Empty Ones inside—all Chinese except this one with the blue eyes—but that telltale silver bob was nowhere to be seen. This was the fourth angel we’d taken together, and still no sign of her. Four in eight months. Zang said it was remarkable that so many were in the area at all, much less that we’d taken every one—but like I said: Rosa made it easy.
After that first angel went down, Rosa just sorta knew where the rest would be. Not just angels either: She knew exactly where to find Unnoticeables, tar men, even Empty Ones. Not specific ones, or else me and Zang would’ve gone straight for Jie, but it was like she had some interior monster radar. That made it so easy it almost wasn’t fun anymore—the third angel we took by just disengaging the parking brake on a nearby garbage truck, watching it bulldoze through a disused mansion in Carlsbad, then picking our way through the debris until we found a ball of light that—I swear to god—just hovered there looking confused. They don’t have faces, I know, but there’s no way the sucker was expecting that.
It’s been like that every outing. No surprises. We’re finally the ones doing the ambushing. I think that’s why we let it go on so long: Zang had been riding me to “talk about the girl” since the second angel, but even he’d gone quiet after the garbage truck coup. We had a good thing going, and when you get hold of a good thing, you ride it until it goes bad.
Everybody knows that, right?
“You holding up a wall or what?” Rosa said. “Little help?”
I blinked.
I walked over and gave her my hand, easing her out from under a small pile of bodies. Guess I’d spaced out for the slaughter. It’s not like I’d been standing here lost in thought for hours—it had been maybe a minute since she chucked the severed head at me, and you’d think she’d give a guy a tick after that, but no. The more angels she took, the faster she got. The faster she got, the more impatient she got. Every conversation you had with her lately, she’d be checking out the windows, looking at her nails, hurrying you on like you were telling a joke she’d heard before. You could see it in her, those little bits of humanity wearing away at the edges.
But then she smiled at you, like she was smiling at me right now—and face covered in blood and gore aside, she was glorious. There were a million prettier girls, a million better sets of teeth, and a million pairs of fuller lips. But none of them knew how to work it like Rosa. They say a smile lights up a room, well, Rosa was a damn disco ball. Her light left you all giddy and disoriented, staring and smiling like a nitwit just ’cause she flashed you some teeth.
“Take a picture buddy,” she said, laughing and punching me in the shoulder.
It was a friendly gesture, but she still put too much into it. Sent me back on my heels.
“Sorry,” she said, and rubbed the wound. She left her hand there a little too long, and the both of us got all dumb and bashful.
“Any time you’re through,” Zang said.
We looked up to where the other Empty Ones had hung him, before Rosa pulled them apart: He was impaled on a metal hook meant to carry fur coats along a conveyor belt. They’d sunk the hook straight into his spine, right between the shoulder blades, making for an awkward placement—he couldn’t reach back to pull it out, and he couldn’t get his hands on anything to lever himself off. He needed our help to get down.
“One second,” Rosa said, stepping over the twitching torso of the blue-eyed Empty One, useless without its head and limbs.
She skirted the blackened asterisk left behind on the floor when the angel exploded—taking most of the Empty Ones and more than a few tar men with it—and stopped at the conveyor controls mounted beside the big rolling door.
“I think it’s this one?” she said, slapping a faded red button.
The conveyor belt clanked into action, taking Zang with it. He glided slowly around the room, arms and legs drifting out as he took the corners, his body limply swinging about the ceiling, a look of blank unhappiness on his face.
Me and Rosa, Christ, we about had a hernia laughing.