Landing (7 page)

PART TWO

Chapter 10

The start of a mission is always
anti-climactic. It usually involves Gabe stashing a grocery bag full of protein
bars, water bottles, and Red Bull in the backseat while Tarren checks the tire
pressure and oil on the Murano.

When we take off, it’s always with
care and caution. Tarren rides the speed limit like it’s an un-mutable law of
the universe. He uses his blinkers. All the time. Actually stops in front of
yellow lights and treats the white crosswalk lines as if they were protected by
force fields.

Of course, I understand the old
maid driving now. It’s all part of Diana’s code — the ironclad list of rules
that her sons continue to honor even six years after her death.

A new unspoken routine governs
these family road trips. I sit up front more often now, and usually the driver
will shed pearls of angel-killing wisdom upon me. These PBS-like moments of
teaching take on vastly different forms and vary drastically in levels of
sarcasm depending on the driver.

Tarren elucidates Diana’s rules of
survival in the soft tones of an acolyte uttering sacred dogma. Gabe’s advice
is always couched in wild anecdotes of dubious verity.

When the pearls are shed in
sufficient quantity, Gabe slides in volume IV of his angel hunting soundtrack.
I’ve memorized all the songs, starting with “Highway to Hell”, not to be
confused with “Highway to the Danger Zone” on volume III. When Gabe goads me,
I’ll sing some of the refrains while he takes lead vocals. Gabe has a decent
voice — smooth and on key — as long as he doesn’t get too ambitious on the high
notes.

Tarren endures us. Sometimes he
leans his head against the window and looks out into the growing dusk for long
lapses of time. I wonder what he’s thinking about, or if he’s found a way to
soothe the frantic thoughts that keep his energy choppy and sharp all day long.

When we switch seats again for the
last leg of our trip, Gabe dons his headphones in the back and gets to work
saving the world via PSP. Tarren and I are able to maintain an almost endless
quiet. As the miles stream beneath our wheels, I press my hand against the cool
window, trying to stake the sun to the horizon so it will not leave me to
another long night.

When this valiant effort fails, I
crack the window just a little so I can smell the desert at night.

Arizona offers a scruffy landscape
and a slow, dry wind that hungers for moisture. Our headlights stretch far into
the night, glancing off the silhouettes of cacti, which can look like an army
of strange, willowy aliens just before the light reveals their true form.

Phoenix has coaxed the flat, dry
land to reason, for it yields sprawling suburbs and Targets next to Ruby
Tuesdays and Home Depots. Farther into the city, dark office buildings emerge
surrounded by pruned desert shrubbery. We turn into the parking lot of a
rundown sports arena. The building is dark.

“They haven’t started setting up
yet,” Tarren says. One look at the smooth churn of his aura, and I can tell
he’s in total gear. Enter theme song and swirling cape.

“Yeah, TWC is total rinky dink.”
Gabe leans forward between us. “Not classy and professional like WWE.”

Tarren considers this new
information. “We’ll scope it tonight and come back for setup tomorrow.”

“Scope away.” Gabe stifles a yawn.

Tarren drives us around the
building and then the side streets, while Gabe pulls up maps on his laptop.
Together, they lay down different escape routes, determine places we can ditch
the car or steal another one if we have to. We memorize where to lose ourselves
in a crowd, where to meet up again if things go south. Gabe pinpoints the local
police and fires stations so we know how long it would take them to get a force
down here and which direction they would come from. Local hospitals are also
noted, just in case.

After an hour, Tarren drops us off
at a motel and goes to get food.

Gabe earns a hard punch in the arm
as soon as we get to our room for registering me as “Buffy”. He yowls about it
until Tarren gets back with the food. Then all is forgotten in the flurry of
sandwich wrappers and ketchup packets.

“We’ll sit on the site tomorrow and
scan everyone connected with the show. Once we have a confirmation, we’ll
regroup and determine the best course of action,” Tarren decides.

“Nothing more we can do tonight,”
Gabe offers hopefully.

Tarren sometimes forgets that he
is, in fact, not a robot and, thus, does occasionally require sleep. Tonight,
however, he looks at Gabe’s tired face and nods.

“Alright. Let’s get out at 6:00
a.m. The crews are probably going to be setting up all day.”

This allows us exactly four hours
of sleep, which works fine for me. I expect a groan from Gabe, but he just
shrugs and offers Tarren the card to the second room. Tarren takes up his
duffle bag, says his customary, “get some rest,” and retreats to his room.

***

Gabe and I have our motel routine
down to an art. While he’s in the shower wailing a song about how peaches come
in a can, I slip off my left glove and pull a rat from the carrying case I keep
in the back corner of the room.

Killing animals, even rats, used to
be somewhat traumatizing for me after I was first turned. I remember that I
would apologize to each animal those times I had enough control to pause before
the deed. Afterward, I would look away from the body — the accusing dead stare
— as I quickly disposed of it.

Somewhere in the last months,
feeding has become routine. I indiscriminately grab a squirming body from the
cage. They are all just loops of pale gold energy. I close my eyes, let my
breath out slowly, and enjoy the pulses of quiet — no song, no hunger, no
struggle for control — as the rodent’s energy surges into me.

Too soon, the world and all its
noise descends upon me again, and I’m shivering in the corner, gripping a dead
rat in my hand.

Sir Hopsalot sits on Gabe’s bed and
stares at me.

“Mind your own business,” I hiss at
him. He paws at one of his long, floppy ears in response.

By the time Gabe is loudly gurgling
mouthwash at the sink, I’ve composed myself and dropped the cold little body
into a black nylon bag I keep for this express purpose. Gabe and I switch rooms
effortlessly. I shower and go through my night routine while Gabe sends out
some last emails, checks on his websites, and plays a few rounds of online
poker.

“Hey,” Gabe calls.

“Wha?” I stick my head out of the
bathroom, still brushing my teeth.

“Random thought, since you don’t
eat, I mean, not human food, do you still need to brush your teeth?”

I’m so used to Tarren’s
double-layered and triple-layered questions that I instinctively pause and try
to suss out Gabe’s true intent. Except it’s Gabe; there is no true intent
beyond curiosity. He’s staring at me now, his head tilted just a little and his
face and aura completely open.

“It wasn’t really meant to be a
stumper,” he says.

I take the toothbrush out of my
mouth and stare at its foamy bristles. “I don’t know,” I say, “never thought
about it before.” Gabe and I look at each other. I shrug. He shrugs and flashes
me one of his random grins before tackling his laptop again.

When I’m done in the bathroom, Gabe
shuts off his computer, and the darkness lies heavy across us in our separate
beds. I listen to the sounds I have come to indisputably identify with motels.
Porn is playing in the room above. To our right, someone snores heavily. Down
the walkway, a vending machine whines. Our bathroom facet drips — d
rip,
drip, drip
— each splash a kiss of cymbals to my sensitive ear drums.

I think Gabe must be just as afraid
of this motel silence as I. He breaks it with stories about his family and
fills in all those years when I didn’t know I had any brothers at all. The
night turns him honest, and so I learn…

…while I was drooling through
braces in middle school, Diana was developing her rules for survival and
repeating them to her children over and over as they drove down endless miles
of bleached cement.

…the year I was doing book reports
on
The Giver
and
Harry Potter
, Gabe killed his first angel. He
was thirteen.

…the same month Diana died, leaving
her three children orphaned and anointed to continue a battle they didn’t
start, I was being stood up at Applebees by Scott Gualdani, feeling like my
life was utterly ruined and then some.

…when Tarren was shivering in a
stolen car, dripping out his life’s blood from a thousand lacerations across
his body, I was knocking down mailboxes with the car, while Karen braced her
hand against the dashboard and suffered heart palpitations.

Sometimes this is all so completely
overwhelming, and I am glad that Gabe cannot see the hot tears that scroll down
my cheeks and soak into my pillow. I alternatively praise and castigate Diana
for sparing me the life she forced upon her other children. For protecting and
shunning me at the same time.

Gabe also speaks of Tammy, and it
eases him. Tarren has mandated that all memories of his twin sister be expunged
from the Fox family record. Burying her deep is the only way he’s found to keep
limping forward, but he doesn’t realize what this does to his brother; how Gabe
clings to these sparse moments of the night when he can cautiously bring her
back to life in furtive whispers.

As the self-appointed secret
guardian of Tammy’s memory, Gabe details her exploits and stubbornly holds onto
random factoids of her life. He tells me about her favorite gun, where she hid
the key to her diary when she was thirteen, how she would suck on her lower lip
when she was bored. These confessions are cathartic for him, turning the
buttercup yellows of regret in his aura to lilac hues.

I do not offer Gabe my own
childhood stories in return, and he is good enough not to ask. Instead, I turn
on my side and watch the gentle currents of his appeased aura. Just before he
drifts to sleep, I ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while. I always
try to spring the painful ones on him at moments like this, when he’s tired,
unsuspecting, and, most importantly, separated from Tarren.

“Gabe?”

“Mmmm?”

“Have you ever…” I stop. I’m not
even sure why I want to know this so badly, but I do.

“Out with it,” Gabe says, rousing
himself.

“Have you ever been drained?”

He makes a little unhappy noise in
his throat. “You mean touched by an angel in a very bad way?” Faint sparks of
red flicker at the edges of his aura. “There have been a lot of close calls —
last week being a prime example — but I’ve been lucky.”

Gabe turns over on his back and
lifts Sir Hopsalot onto his chest. “Tarren got drained once. In Las Vegas. Bout
two, no, man, it’s been three years now. Bodies started showing up in alleys
all over the city. Mostly homeless guys, dealers, gang members. Took me a while
to find the pattern, but after I did, I was pretty sure it was an angel.”

“Weird though.” Gabe scratches the
rabbit behind its floppy ear. “Angels aren’t usually so selective. This one was
moving all over the city, striking different places every night. We couldn’t
figure out how to find it.”

“What’d you do?”

“We split up and canvassed random
parts of the city each night. It was hot as hell. I remember that; sweating,
even at night. Lots of chafing in very sensitive places.”

Gabe is quiet, but his aura churns
faster. More rosy hues. Red is the color of pain, anger…and fear.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I
offer.

“Not much to tell. We were
searching that fucking city for, like, a week. One night Tarren didn’t check
in. I knew that was trouble right away. I just…I knew. So I doubled back,
started searching all the alleyways he had lined up for the night. God, it took
me over an hour. I kept texting, calling, and nothing.” Gabe’s voice wavers,
and he takes a shaky breath to steady himself. I admire the effort, but he
can’t mask his aura like his brother can. It lights up with thick streaks of
pained red and moves in choppy waved around him.

The song of my hunger is loud in
the room. I concentrate to separate Gabe’s voice from the heady melodies.

“I found an alley with two bodies
in it,” Gabe continues. “One of them was Tarren. He wasn’t moving. Maya, I
thought he was dead.” Gabe turns toward me, forgetting the rabbit on his chest.
“Oh shit.” He quickly repositions Sir Hopsalot so that the rabbit is in the
crook of his arm.

“He wasn’t moving,” Gabe continues,
“and there was this second where, it’s like, I could feel the world breaking
apart under my feet. Like, there was nothing left. That doesn’t make any
sense.”

“It does,” I whisper.
Ryan,
Avalon.

“I went ballistic, grabbing
Tarren’s shirt, yelling. Totally stupid, right, but his eyes opened, and that
was, oh god, I just started laughing. Don’t know why, adrenaline or something.
Tarren, he like, I mean the guy can’t even move, and he’s telling me to be
quiet, that I’m drawing attention. But it was music to my ears. He could barely
walk. It took us forever to get to the car, and then he slept for two days
straight.”

“What about the other body? In the
alley?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, I checked on him too. Not
quite the same dramatics. He was dead. Drained to the very last drop. Tarren
must have tried to rescue the guy or something.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I prop
myself up on my elbow. “The angel wasn’t in the alley when you found Tarren? It
just let him go after it started feeding?” I think about the terrible,
animalistic need that scourges my brain when I feed, how my reason — my very self
— is burned away in those few moments of total quiet. I could never stop myself
in the middle of feeding.