Angel Radio Read online

  When I wasn’t avoiding the angels, I was looting random buildings in search of something to fill my time. Domestic animals can’t survive too long in the wild, but I had made it my personal quest to free them all. It was better that they die outside and become something else’s food than to just decompose in a house.

  They all made me feel pretty sad too, like they were all waiting for their owners to feed them and love them again. A couple had taken to following me around and begging for food, and I’d just pet them a bit and walk on.

  I had raided all the stores downtown, of course. Tried on all the clothes I would never buy, drank warm beer till I puked, and choked on a cigarette or two. I raided an electronics store and played with all the battery-powered toys. I took an expensive car, crashed it, and then took another one. And crashed that one too. I explored the two or three mansions we had in town, relishing in indoor pools and lavish décor, dreaming about parties I would never have been invited to.

  My favorite possession had to be my radio from the wilderness and camping shop. Battery powered, solar powered, and hand-crank powered, it was unstoppable. And only bringing me static, of course. But it was that static that lulled me to sleep each night, and it was that static that haunted my dreams.

  I had claimed each street for my own. Elliot Street was all neon spray paint, flowers, and swirls all around, while Flat Street was for moping, fire, skulls, and random words in black paint. I took the whole town, and I tried to fill it as much as possible with whatever I could.

  I ran naked in the streets whenever it rained. I washed my body in concrete potholes and my hair under gutters, and then I’d jump in the river and do it all over again.

  At least I had food to spare. The first few days I had tried to eat all the perishables I could, and several months in, I was down to the canned foods. But there was a lot of canned food. Plenty in the stores, more in the warehouse and enough in every person’s house. I had lighters and matches to spare, and certainly enough wood to burn.

  I wished I was living in a desolate desert future, fighting others for food to survive, instead of this empty forest town full of everything I could need. At least it’d be interesting.

  I talked mostly to the animals, and once or twice, to the angels. I yelled at the angels, I cried at the angels, I threw rocks at them, and spat at them, and they’d just continue to float on their usual routes.

  I was now thoroughly convinced that boy with beautiful eyes had been a hallucination. I had been in so much shock, I had dreamed him up; that had to be it. But I still would climb to the roof of the stone church and look down on the streets, waiting in vain for something to move.

  And at night I’d curl up in my nest of blankets, and I’d put the radio on full blast, waiting and waiting and waiting.

  IT WAS another morning, and I was once again too lazy to figure out the date. In an attempt to cling to the old ways, I took an ancient laptop from one of the computer carts. Or really, I took the entire cart. Each battery only lasted a couple hours, and it wouldn’t be long before I had used them all up.

  Living like this really made me wish I hadn’t studied painting. If I had taken a keen interest in mechanics, I could maybe figure a way to get electricity. It’d be nice to have working lights again.

  The Internet was long gone at this point, but the laptop still played Minesweeper and solitaire. I played them until I was sick of them, but I continued on anyway.

  I had also started to write. I had a handwritten journal, one I was having trouble maintaining. My entry for yesterday, for example, read:

  Another day. Windy. Found a couple cute dogs. Almost crossed paths with the tawny angel. Maybe I should try to name it again. I’ve read more about angel names. Lots of—iels. Lots of weird sounds. One of them must fit. Painted Samson Greenberg from physics class. Slept.

  Writing wasn’t really my forte. I guess I had a desire to record all I had done, like if someone found it in the future, but of course there was no one left. Maybe friendly aliens would find it many years from now, and they could study the last days of humanity from it. I don’t know.

  I liked to imagine myself as a movie character, music swelling as I struggled to survive by myself. The audience cries with me, feeling empathy. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, the mysterious boy with beautiful eyes sweeps in. He kills the library angel with a few stabs, and bravely grabs my hand. We run together as the tawny and dusty angels follow close, and then we turn around and reveal our weapons, destroying the last two angels easily. Then the boy takes me away to the last stronghold of humanity; everything is okay. The film ends on a triumphant note, hopeful of the human race’s will to survive.

  This is not a movie, though.

  Personally, I’d even accept demons tearing up the earth and Satan ascending to take on God for the final battle or whatever if it meant those damn angels would leave. Maybe I’d fit in with the demons. At least they’d be someone to talk with.

  After fiddling on the computer until I became bored, I decided to head out for a walk. I brought my radio with me, holding it by the handle with its volume on full blast. I felt like I needed a totem of humanity whenever I wandered the woods, or else it’d be like society never existed.

  The great mountain Wantastiquet overlooked the town, and I had it in my heart that I wanted to climb it. I mean, it was an appealing thought. But honestly I didn’t care much either way. I just needed something to do, and if pretending this mountain mattered to me helped, wonderful.

  My bucket list was simple and, ultimately, uninspired. And lately it had become impossible. I couldn’t go on a safari anymore or find love or travel Italy. My new bucket list was simply to keep on living. Climb a mountain or two. Find something meaningful in this half life.

  It was a breezy September day, the nights getting shorter and the days getting colder. The leaves had yet to turn, but last year’s colors still lined the forest trail. Not even crunchy anymore, they sounded like paper on my shoes.

  I’m not weak willed, but I did cry. Not a heavy thing, not a pathetic thing, just sort of a solitary thing. I was alone. I was alone, and it would sink in for what felt like the first time every couple of hours.

  I was feeling lame, even more so because I felt bad about wallowing. I was ashamed to be so miserable, and then angry with myself that I felt bad about being depressed. Like what? I was supposed to be happy about being the last human alive?

  Arguing with myself wasn’t going to get me anywhere, and neither was angst.

  I had a mountain to climb.

  A few hours later, I sat on the rocks that marked the top. They weren’t technically the highest point, but they did mark the best overlook of the town. From here I couldn’t easily tell it was empty. I could almost pretend I was just a school kid, coming up here to hang out on the weekend. Eating a lunch of nonperishable sweets. Probably off to do homework in a few hours.

  The radio interrupted my daydreams. It snapped my attention and what felt like my neck, as I spun around to watch it carefully.

  Static has a very particular quality to it. Steady and a mix between repetitive and nonrepetitive. So to hear anything else, even the slightest change in sound, was deafeningly different.

  I can’t sum up what it did to me. It stopped my heart and quickened it at the same time. My head grew crazy, and I almost thought I had finally snapped.

  But no—

  Voices. Voices in the static, incomprehensible sounds and noises, meaningless and empty, but bringing me hope all the same.

  I lifted the radio into the air, antenna as high as it could go. I stood on my toes, then ran into the woods in search of the highest point, and eventually I heard it.

  “—rible… any… I… it’s possib…. And that en… io.”

  Then there was a sort of high-pitched and short-lived whine, the kind old TVs make when they turn off, and the static became uniform again. But it was enough for me.

  There were voices out there. People out there. I had hear
d at least two voices—a man and a woman. And surely this couldn’t be their only broadcast—perhaps the first, but they were probably trying to signal other survivors. They probably weren’t going to give up now, and neither was I.

  Can you follow a radio signal to its tower? I think you can. And even if you can’t, I really didn’t care. There were other people out there. I was going to pack my bags and leave the library angel, the tawny streaked angel, and the dusty spotted angel behind for good. Leave old memories behind and make some new ones.

  I started laughing as I made my way down the mountain. I almost ran down, sliding on the leaves and nearly slamming into several trees. I didn’t care. I was laughing for the first time in a long time. I found the tawny angel in the street and danced around it, unafraid. I sang a song to it.

  I left my studio without touching my paintings. Maybe years from now I would return here with other humans, and I could give them a tour of my personal art gallery.

  I had no idea where I was heading, truthfully, but I was too excited to care. I started on my way, over the hill and across the bridge and past the roundabout, until finally I was out of town and on the highway.

  It was going to be a long walk. But I had a feeling I could handle it.

  2

  THE FIRST time I heard a full broadcast, uninterrupted, was a few miles down the road.

  I realized about an hour in that I should have just taken someone’s car and driven until I ran out of gas, but I didn’t want to bother with it. Plus the thought of having to drag a corpse out of a car before being able to drive anywhere disgusted me.

  Sort of lazy, yes, but I did most literally have all the time in the world. I didn’t even have to worry about food or water, since most of the cars were filled with food rations and first aid kits. I took what I needed, including a particularly good hiking backpack to carry all my stuff.

  Any corpses, whether on the ground or leaning out car windows, had rotted almost entirely away by now. They still smelled putrid in harsh sunlight, even if they were mostly bone.

  Oddly enough, there weren’t that many bodies. There had been nearly none back in town, and out here, their numbers were even fewer. Where did everyone go? Did the angels eat them?

  Two days in I stopped in the town of Windsor. It wasn’t that special of a place, similar to the one I had come from—an old riverside town in the forest. I didn’t rest long.

  But it was there, inside the old church that I was sleeping in for the night’s rain, that I heard the broadcast.

  It started with a change in the signal. I was half-asleep when I heard it, eyes closed and on the brink of exhaustion. But then there was a sharp noise, and I frantically leapt for the dial.

  “…Ello. Good morning. This is Emil speaking. Your host, now and forever.” I had long imagined a human voice, but my dreams couldn’t start to compare to the reality that was coming from the radio in front of me. “We have a special report for you today, dear listener, on a favorite sort of angel—the angel sort of angel! I mean the watching sort, to be more specific.”

  “The Watchers,” a woman corrected. She yawned. “You must’ve seen them. Big. Weird. Lots of eyes. Lots of feathers. Not much more to say.”

  “Surely…?” Emil started to ask but dropped it.

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen them, but not, like, enough to really get a read on them. I’ve never seen them out in the sky when it’s raining, and they seem to like traveling in groups. And they have sort of weird, fleshy skin. Wonder what’s up with that? Has anyone actually touched one before? If you, or anyone you love, has touched a Watcher angel, please contact us. I want to know. We want to know.”

  “Naomi, stay on topic,” said another woman.

  “Right, right, right. I don’t have much more to say. I haven’t really been taking notes here. I tried to draw one, though, but that proved too hard. Too many layers. Um.” She sounded confused. “I guess if you wanted to kill one, it wouldn’t be too hard to just stab them in one of their eyes. Kind of an obvious flaw in their design.”

  Silence.

  “That’s all I have.”

  “Oh. Thank you,” Emil said. “That was very… helpful. And now, Ada with the weather.”

  “Yeah,” the other woman said, “so, I’ve been observing a lot of angels that I’m going to dub ‘Cherubim’ heading up north. You know. Four faces, more human shaped than balloon, lots of fire. They’re not the only ones heading north, though—shit tons of angels are passing above us every day. I don’t know and I don’t care what they’re doing there, but I think we should move down south and start living on a beach somewhere instead of in this hellhole.”

  “You know we can’t do that. This job is our job.”

  “I want a raise.”

  “You know we can’t do that either. Please continue your report.”

  “Oh, whatever. So anyway, bye-bye Cherubim. We’ve been hearing of an increase in Messenger activity as well, but until someone sends us actual evidence, we’re going to politely ignore it.”

  “I think that concludes the news for today,” said Naomi. “This has been Angel Radio.”

  “See you next time, dear listeners, and remember: you are always being watched,” Emil said, and there was a sharp wave of static.

  ONE THING was clear: there had to be a colony of humans nearby, fighting the angels, their broadcasts a beacon of hope for other survivors. They were even comfortable enough to joke around.

  I was too hyper to sit still. Never before had everything seemed so possible. I paced the floor of the church a couple times before deciding I was just too amped to fall back asleep. I gathered my stuff, double-checking that the radio was completely sealed in its plastic case, and departed.

  There were more angels floating around me the longer I walked, their bodies so intricate and layered that they made me think of fleshy castles. I thought of them as Watchers, and they started to appear the moment the rain let up. Surely the angels didn’t have a problem with water? That would be ridiculously bad planning on their part if so.

  There was another kind of angel in the sky, ones I had dubbed Messengers. They were large and often quite shapeless. Most were like ovals, a sort of reverse pyramid that lacked any features besides wings and eyes. There was a feeling of serenity about them, still, as they hung throughout the sky. Their feathers ruffled in the breeze as they bobbed slightly, huge eyes framed with long eyelashes. I had grown used to them.

  The Watchers were similar—in fact, I wouldn’t have differentiated between them if I hadn’t spent so long watching them as I walked. They had more eyes than the Messengers and were more circular. Often, they’d have one large eye covering one face of their body, with smaller ones spiraling off from that. Unlike Messengers, they rarely closed them.

  For one of the last remaining humans on an empty Earth, things were going well for me. It would have been better if there were some way to find the other humans, but I liked to think of myself as an optimist.

  The angels, like particularly slow butterflies, seemed farther away now. I mean that very literally, as they were the farthest I’d ever seen them before.

  It was one of those sort of comical but really horrifying moments when I noticed a shadow on the ground that wasn’t there before.

  And with a pained movement that ended in me falling on the ground, I looked behind me.

  And then I looked up.

  I had never seen an angel like this one before. Its body was massive and constantly writhing with its wings; wings of all sorts, like sparrows and eagles and birds of paradise, were all balled into one form. Each wing had its eyes, and all of its eyes were incredibly human and incredibly terrifying.

  Its head was not attached to its body at all, but floating above it and peering down with its incredibly long maw. Its face was that of a bird’s skull, the true face below covered by a pair of enormous wings.

  Another pair of wings gaped to the sky, feathers to the stars, and yet another pair covered its f
eet and swept the ground. It had five hands, each ending in a different creature’s paw, with the fifth coming straight from the center of its chest and ending in a human hand.

  About its head twirled two cosmic rings, their whole being covered in eyes. The rings interlocked under the floating head of the angel in such a way that the head was fully surrounded. Where the neck should have been on the body below was just a hollow tube.

  It was an Ophanim, I decided. A throne. And sitting on its shoulders—or perhaps they were part of it?—were several other angels.

  It bobbed like it was walking, one foot was moving at a time, but glancing at its body revealed it was floating about two feet off the ground.

  I scurried to get to my feet, but as I looked at its eyes I fell straight back down again. I watched it move closer to me, and I pressed my back to the ground and held my breath.

  And then it passed over me, and for a moment I was in the eye of the hurricane. Inside the angel was darkness and moving shapes and tiny dots of light, like white dust on black paper. And all the way on the other side, much farther away than it should’ve been, was the neck hole.

  As it moved over me entirely and I sat looking up to the center, it stopped.

  It hung above me, and suddenly I was gasping for air and choking on fear, and I could only feel adrenaline and a need to not move at all. I lay transfixed, staring straight through the pinhole of light that felt more and more like a spotlight. There was a delay before I realized I was hyperventilating.

  I was trembling in the darkness and staring at the light. Ignoring the lack of danger I seemed to be in. It took too much work to force myself to stand, so I crawled across the asphalt until I came to the edge of the shadows. I didn’t feel better until I hit the sunlight and cleared a distance of fifteen feet. I lay back on the road, hands covering my eyes, and slowed my breathing.

  Then I got up, the Ophanim already long past me and making its way down the road.

  I think I had fainted at some point.