The second thing Dad told me—when we finally escaped, listening for the scream of monsters and the beat of boots against the ground—was that if the Angels want to get their hands on me, I have to make them suffer for it.
I still taste his blood.
I vault the Jersey barriers at the Angel checkpoint and hit the ground hard on the other side. There are lawn chairs back here, a Bible, and a few bottles of water. The road is full of broken glass. The bodies sway.
Run.
I dreamed about what it would be like on the other side of the bridge. Dad and I could head north and find a place to make it through the summer. Sure, there would be Angels, because there would always be Angels until the last nonbeliever was dead, but we would have all the earth to avoid them. Maybe we would meet someone: a handsome nonbeliever who would fall for me when I soaked his hands in warm water and bandaged his wounds. He would be sweet and a little brash and queer as hell, and he wouldn’t mess up my pronouns when he saw my chest for the first time. Sometimes he was blond, like my fiancé. Most of the time, he wasn’t.
Stop. Don’t think about him. Don’t think about Theo. None of it matters anyway, because none of it will ever happen. The Flood will break me like it breaks everything else, and I need to keep the monster away from the Angels. I need to get out, I need to get away, I need to—
An Angel whistles, and the whistle is met with a scream.
Between the cars ahead of me, a tangle of limbs unfolds, and it shrieks and howls with all the pain of Hell, the weeping and gnashing of teeth. A creature made of corpses and the Flood—sharpened ribs lining its back in a row of spines, eyeballs blinking between sinew, muscles so swollen they split the skin—rises from the wreckage. Claws the size of arm bones curl around a truck cab and crumple it.
I stop running. No. No, no, no. NO.
Not a Grace. Not when I’m so close.
What had once been a person’s face opens from the bottom of its jaw, up between the eyes and back to the nape of its neck, showing teeth smeared black with Flood rot. I faintly register the sound of boots and shouting, but that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the monster towering above me, dripping decay and blocking the only way out.
The third thing Dad told me—when he realized what I could do, when I reached out to a Grace and begged it to kill every Angel it could find; when I stood in a sea of gore, a beast curled around me.
He told me to be good.
To never become the monster the Angels want me to be, for evil begets evil begets evil.
The sound of boots slows and stops. My legs fail me. I stumble to the ground, pressing my palms to the burning road.
Be good. Make them suffer. Being good means being quiet, obedient, turning away from the virus’s power the same way Eve should have turned away from the apple. Making them suffer means seizing the Grace and taking the Angels down with me in a blaze of flesh and fury.
I could stop this. I could whisper across this street and make the Angels regret ever laying their hands on me.
I almost reach out for the Grace.
But.
Dad died holding my face—his blood smeared down my tongue, across my cheeks, matted in my hair—and begging me to be good.
He’s not waiting for me. I can’t keep running like this. I am so, so tired.
Good wins out.
“I’ll be good. I’ll be good, I’ll be good.” I say it out loud like that will make failure feel any better, as if my insides aren’t screaming to burn the Angels in hellfire, as if there’s any way I could obey all of Dad’s words at once. “I’ll be good, O Lord, lend me Your strength, lead and guide me—”
Hot liquid trickles over my chin, and I wipe my mouth. My fingers come away black and red.