“Sister Woodside!” Brother Hutch cries. “Your mother is worried about you! She wants her daughter to come home.”
The first thing Dad told me—when Mom said I’d see the Lord’s plan for my womanhood eventually, that she’d carve it into me if she had to—he told me I’m a man, and I fought for it, and nobody can take that from me.
Open your eyes. Breathe. Pull it together, Benji, pull it together.
The death squads haven’t gotten me yet.
I can finish what Dad started.
I can get out of Acheson, Pennsylvania.
I peek from behind the pillar to look down the street. The riverfront district was probably beautiful before Judgment Day. Before the Flood hit. Now, ivy climbs up glass skyscrapers and cars rust in parking-lot graveyards. Lawns and gardens have gone wild, smothering everything they can reach. Flowers bloom in February. It’s one of the few good months for flowers. They’ll die of thirst by April.
But I don’t see any Angels. Not yet.
Brother Hutch shouts to the heavens, “We don’t want to hurt you, we don’t.”
The only way in or out of southern Acheson is the bridge—the one bridge the Angels didn’t destroy on Judgment Day. It’s just half a block from me. With the death squads closing in and the bridge guards called away to join the hunt, this is my only shot.
I was supposed to do this with Dad. We were supposed to leave Acheson together. We were supposed to make it to Acresfield County together. Now he’s a corpse in the lawn of a crumbling hotel, brains soaking into the dirt, returning to earth for out of it he was taken.
I can’t finish what we started if I stand here begging God for things to be different. It won’t bring him back.
Breathe.
Run.
I’ve been running for days but not like this. Not with my legs screaming and my sneakers pounding the sidewalk in time with my heartbeat. I pretend Dad is right behind me, that I can’t hear him because I’m breathing too hard, that I can mistake him for a blur in the windows across the street.
I make it to the mouth of the bridge. I don’t stop, just dive between the wreckage of cars choking the entrance. The bridge shines silver, suspension towers dangling thick metal wires from bank to bank. It belongs to the Angels now. A banner flutters high above me: GOD LOVES YOU. Corpses dangle from the wires, yellow-pink organs hanging from their stomachs to obscure their nakedness, like Adam and Eve ashamed of their bodies.
One of the bodies is twisted, the leg held at a broken angle, and I can’t tell if the Angels did that or the Flood did. The Flood is cruel. It’ll do some terrible things to a body.
Not that I need another reminder.
This is a long bridge. I can almost convince myself that Dad is waiting on the other side, holding our backpacks, demanding, What took you so long? I’ll crash into him, and we’ll run until we’re away from Acheson, so far away from every Angel camp and colony that they’ll never find us again. Dad and I memorized a map of every outpost in the surrounding states and every major stronghold in North America. We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.
“There!”
I shouldn’t look, I shouldn’t.
I do.
I know the Angel behind me is Brother Hutch because his robes are splattered with Dad’s blood. His rifle hangs from a strap over his shoulder. He’s close enough that I can make out the bruises on his knuckles, the stains on his face mask.
Masks keep the Flood out, but I haven’t worn one for a while. I can’t get infected twice.
“Sister Woodside,” Brother Hutch says, and the other Angels emerge from the shadows, the ruins, the back-streets, and I don’t stand still a moment longer.