Hell Followed with Us(22)

I want to join the Watch. I need to prove I’m not a danger. I force my voice to steady and scrub all the anger from it, making sure it comes out quiet and calm.

I say, “I was trying to find a Grace. So I could practice.”

“Practice,” Nick repeats.

It sounds sad when I say it out loud. “I scared myself at the funeral. This is what I was talking about at the park. Being a monster and everything.” But even if it’s pitiful, I have to say it. “I want to help you. I want to join the Watch”—Nick blinks—”but I don’t want to hurt my friends.”

Nick says, “You’re not friends with Alex. Nobody is friends with Alex.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s not,” he concedes. “You want to join the Watch?”

“I do.” Make them suffer for it. Be good. “God, I do.”

Nick holds out his hand. “The map.”

I give it to him. He points to an unlabeled spot nearby. “There’s a homeless shelter here. Let’s go.”



* * *





“So what was that at the funeral?” Nick asks. We’re walking down the middle of the road; feral Graces can be heard from a block away, and death squads don’t usually roam at night. No need to stick to the sidewalks. “If you know.”

I stick my hands in my pockets. “The Flood messes with your head.”

He glances at me. The starlight really brings out his eyes. People never talk about how pretty dark eyes are, especially the so-dark-they’re-almost-black of Nick’s.

“How much?” he says.

“Not a lot,” I say. “Not yet, at least.”

“We’ll deal with it.”

We find the homeless shelter a few blocks away, squat and nondescript. I’ve never seen one in real life before. When I was younger, Mom would have hurried past it, giving me a lecture about the dangers of overpopulation and laziness, how some people refuse to take responsibility for their lives. They must have done something wrong for them to be punished this way. God is kind; God is just. That wouldn’t fly at the ALC. It’s been just a few days, and I know how they would react: “God sure as hell isn’t. People were poor because the rich wanted them to be, just like we’re fucked now because the Angels want us to be.”

The inside of the Acheson Rescue Mission is a massacre. The windows let in just enough light to see by, illuminating rows of stained beds and plastic chairs. It may as well have been a military barrack or maybe a low-security prison. No privacy, no human comfort, just four walls and a cot.

And the bodies. Always the bodies. The Flood is in their bones—splinters break off from femurs and jaws, strange structures grow through chest cavities. I mouth my cobbled-together prayer for the dead as we walk between the beds, because Mom isn’t here to stop me.

This is what Seraph was made for. To turn every human being into this. To destroy what’s left of the world.

“Maybe there’s a back room,” I offer. My voice is too loud in the silence. “There’s just bones.”

Nick goes back to the front desk and sticks his hand in a trash can.

I say, “Um.”

He pulls out a glass bottle, weighs it for a second, and smashes it on the floor.

“Christ!” And it feels good to shout it, to mean it. It burns through me like blood rushing back into my fingertips, and I do it again because I can. “Christ, what the hell!”

A low, long wail keens from the far side of the hall. It rattles in my ribs and puts every hair on edge, the way a child’s scream gets under your skin.

A Grace.

I’m across the room before I can stop myself, holding on to the edges of cots to keep myself together. My fingers snag moth-eaten sheets. A Grace. A Grace.

I’m at the edge of its bed, wavering on my feet.

This is me.

This is what I’ll become.

Its mass of white, whirling eyes lock on me, and it begins to scream. High, shrieking, choked with phlegm. Nick stops a few steps away, but I don’t. I move forward because I have to.

It’s more human than not, more human than some but less human than the inside-out man Dad and I saw on the apartment floor days ago. A head, a torso, close enough. But its ribs open into a second set of teeth, gray organs pulsing underneath like fat, heavy tonsils. Its lower jaw has melted into its chest, and molars stick out of its collarbones. One desiccated arm is wrenched above its head, lashed to the bedframe by a pair of old handcuffs.

It. I can’t keep saying it. That’s not right. I want to press my hands to its, their, their skin, reach into their organs the way Theo brought the flesh to his lips, whisper to them, We’re the same thing, we’re the same, can you tell?

Nick says, “Are you all right?”

I’m so much more than all right. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

The Grace makes a pitiful sound, scared and small. I press my hand to the broken expanse of their chest.

“Hey,” I whisper, and I make sure to whisper it too. Softly. Gently. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

They’re in so much pain. They’ve spent two years like this, kept alive by the Flood and nothing else, alone for so long. Their skin is mottled all kinds of colors, green and black and yellow, looking like it might come off in my hand when I take it away. It won’t, though. Grace skin is tough and hard, impervious, intensely painful. It’s why people like Nick have to get them in the soft parts—the mouth and eyes, into the brain.