It makes perfect sense for us to head away from where the angels will be.

Perfect sense.

I start the engine. We head east. Toward the Resistance camp.

50

We see smoke in the distance long before we reach Palo Alto. Paige flies ahead with her locusts while we continue to weave through dead traffic.

The angels shouldn’t be attacking until dusk. People should still be safe. But by the time we reach the Resistance camp, I know I’m only telling myself fairy tales.

I park the truck on El Camino and get out of the cab. The buildings are intact except for one, which is on fire.

There are bodies strewn across the street. The cars and walls of the school are splashed with blood. I hope it’s not people blood, but I’m not confident about that.

‘Stay here, Mom. I’ll see what’s going on.’ I check the sky as I get out of the truck to make sure Paige hid in the trees like I told her to. She and her locusts are nowhere in sight. The Resistance probably would have seen her coming if they weren’t so preoccupied.

I walk toward the school, trying to see if anyone is alive. I only take a few steps toward the carnage before I stop. I’m afraid I might see someone I know among the bodies.

The wind blows leaves and bits of garbage. People’s hair flows in the wind, thankfully covering some of their faces. A piece of paper tumbles by and lands on a body that is staring at the smoke-filled sky.

The paper plasters itself against the body’s shoulder, right beside the pale, dead face staring blankly into the sky. It’s a flyer for Dee and Dum’s talent show.

Come one, come all

To the greatest show of all!

A talent show. Those guys actually thought we could have something as silly and frivolous as a talent show.

I scan the faces of the bodies draped across the hoods of cars, the road, the schoolyard, hoping I won’t see Dee or Dum. I walk slowly through the parking lot. A few people are whimpering, curled and crying on the asphalt.

In the school, the windows are smashed, the doors are unhinged and broken, the desks and chairs are thrown all over the yellow grass. There’s more life and motion here, though. People cry over bodies, hug each other, walk dazed and in shock.

I stop to help a girl who is trying to stop the blood flow from a man’s severed arm.

‘What happened?’ I ask, bracing myself to hear a horror story of angels and monsters.

‘Dead people,’ she says, crying. ‘They came shambling in after a bunch of our fighters left for a mission. We just had a skeleton crew to defend the rest of us. Everyone freaked. It was a bloodbath. We thought it was over. But word must have got out that we’ve been attacked and defenseless, because then the gangs came.’

People did this? Not monsters, not angels, not Pit lords. People attacking people.

I shut my eyes. I could blame the angels for turning us into this, but we were doing stuff like this long before they came, weren’t we?

‘What did the gangs want?’ I ask, reluctantly opening my eyes to face the world again.

‘Whatever they could get.’ She wraps a ripped shirt around the unconscious guy’s severed arm. ‘Some of them kept yelling that they wanted their food back. The stuff we took from them when we took over their store.’

The memory of the bloody handprint smeared across the nearby grocery store’s door comes back to me. I had guessed the Resistance had taken it from a gang.

When an older guy comes over to help, I drift off into another group carrying the wounded into the main building.

I came here to say a quick warning and then head north or south with my family. But we end up helping out while I look for Obi. No one knows where he is.

My mom rushes to our old classroom for her stockpile of rotten eggs. Not surprisingly, they’re still there. I guess no one wanted to clear out that mess. She hands out cartons of them just in case hellions come. People gather around her to take them.

‘They’re coming back!’ someone yells.

On the edge of the grove, shadows lurch toward us.

Everyone who is mobile stampedes toward the nearest building. A few stand by the injured, pointing guns or lifting shovels or knives as they get ready to defend their loved ones.

It’s the locust victims who were dubbed the resurrected by Uriel. Their shriveled bodies shuffle toward us in a strange, zombielike fashion. It’s as if they’re so convinced that they’re dead and resurrected that they play the part. It’s as if being treated like monsters convinced them that they’re supposed to behave like monsters.

But before they get close enough to begin a fight, my sister circles overhead with her locusts. There are only three of them, but if there’s one thing the locust victims fear, it’s the locusts.

As soon as the resurrected see them, they scatter back into the grove across the street and disappear, no longer shuffling like zombies.

The Resistance people stare at the fleeing attackers, then at Paige and her pets as they fly low overhead. Some of the people give up on their injured and take cover, apparently more afraid of the locusts than of the resurrected.

The rest, though, stand firm and point their guns at Paige.

One of them is the guy who was in the council room with Obi the last time I was here. The one who lassoed Paige like an angry villager chasing after Frankenstein’s monster. I think Obi called him Martin.

‘She’s here to help.’ I put my arms out to try to calm everyone. ‘It’s all right. She’s on our side. Look, she scared the attackers.’