Behind her, the line of children and women slowed to a ragged halt. Helen appeared at her elbow. "What is it?"
Angel didn't answer. She stared at the door ahead, trying to think what she could do. The one thing she could not do was to tell Helen the truth: that they were trapped.
WHEN HER PARENTS die, Angel Perez becomes a true child of the streets. She has no family and no home. She has no one to look after her. She has no skills and no knowledge of how to forage for food and water or how to find shelter or how to survive for more than a day. She is eight years old.
But luck favors her. She manages to survive for five days by staying hidden and living on the little food and water her parents scavenged before the plague took them. She fights down her fear and spends her time trying to think what to do.
Then Johnny finds her.
His given name is Juan Gonzalez, and like her parents he has come over the border to make a better life. He seems old to her, even though he is only forty–five. His hair is wild and long, his face bearded and scarred, and his hands weathered and gnarled. But his voice is kind, and when he finds her hiding in the rubble of the home her parents made for her, he doesn't try to approach her too quickly or play the son of games that might frighten her. He simply starts talking to her, calling her little one and telling her she can't stay where she is, that it is too dangerous, that all of LA is too dangerous for an eight–year–old girl. She must come with him, he says. He has a place not far from there and she can stay there with him. He is tired of living alone anyway, and he wants someone to talk to. She is under no obligation to stay. She can leave whenever she wants, and he will never hurt her or do anything that she doesn't want him to.
She believes him. She can't say why, but she does. So she goes with him and lives with him for six years. He teaches her to forage and to cook. He teaches her how to defend herself with just her hands and feet. He teaches her how to look out for the things that might threaten her— the scavengers and the mutants and the animals. He shows her places she can run to if anything ever happens to him. He even shows her how to use the short–barreled flechette that he keeps for emergencies he hopes will never arrive. He tells her that she is the daughter he will never have, the daughter he would have wanted if things had worked out differently.
Everybody knows him. Johnny is the man, the one everyone looks up to. The street people like him for the same reasons Angel does: he is respectful of and kind to them and does what he can to help them in their struggle to survive. He watches out for them in the same way he watches out for her, and their little barrio community is tight–knit and protective. Even if the compounds will not have them, with their fear of outsiders and plague, they will have each other.
But it isn't enough to save them. The collapse of civilization has spawned all sorts of human flotsam and jetsam, and some of it eventually finds its way to their hideaway. The gang calls itself the Blade Runners and believes itself the beginning of a new order. Its members are their own law, and their allegiance is to one another and no one else. They go where they choose, and take what they want. Where they come from or how they get to LA and Angel's little community is a mystery that she later decides has more to do with perverse chance than anything else.
Johnny stands up to them when they threaten the others, bringing out the flechette, and they back down. But they hover at the fringes of the community, angry and vengeful and determined to get what they want, even if what they want is barely worth the effort. People are crazy then, just as they are crazy now.
They do insane, inexplicable things; they do them without reason or they do them for the worst of reasons. Angel knows when she sees these men that they are mad.
She knows it the same way that she knows exactly how the madness will end.
One night, Johnny doesn't come home. She knows right away that he is dead, that the Blades have found a way to catch him off guard and kill him. She knows, as well, that they will be coming next for her. She has seen how several of them look at her, and she knows what that means. She cries first because she is sad and afraid and because her life is forever changed with Johnny gone. She thinks about seeking help from some of the others. She thinks about fleeing into another pan of the city.
Then she brings out the flechette, hides herself in the crumbling warehouse next to where she and Johnny made their home, and hunkers down to wait.
The wait is short. The Blades appear around midnight, slinking out of the shadows like dogs, creeping up on the now deserted home, ten strong, armed with knives and clubs. They probably think her asleep. They probably think she does not yet realize what they have done to Johnny and will catch her unawares. They are not very good at what they are attempting, making enough noise that their approach would have awakened her even if she had been sleeping. But that doesn't make them any less dangerous or odious, and her mind is made up as to what she will do to them.
She waits until they have crowded inside, all but one who stays at the door as lookout. He leans against the frame and looks bored, glancing inside periodically as he waits for something to happen. She is upon him by then, rounding the corner of the house. The flechette fires ten rounds and cuts a twelve–foot–wide swath with each discharge. She uses the first round on the lookout, blowing him back through the doorway and into the others. She uses the next seven on the ones she catches inside, leaving them shattered and broken.
She uses the last on the one who somehow manages to get out through a window, catching up with him two blocks away and taking his head off.
She is left shaking and furious and terrified all at once, and she knows in the aftermath of her retribution that nothing in her life will ever be the same.
HER THOUGHTS OF Johnny and of that night ten years ago when she destroyed the Blade Runners were there and gone in seconds. She wished she had a weapon like the flechette now, something that could open up a path with shards of metal that would rip apart even a demon. But she had only her staff and her skills to protect more than two hundred children and a handful of women, and she was afraid it wasn't enough.
"Angel, what's wrong?" Helen hissed again.
She looked at the other woman, then at the door in front of her, and made up her mind. She had little choice. They had to either go forward or turn around and go back; all the other entrances had long since collapsed or been sealed.
Although the situation was different from the one she had faced after Johnny was killed, it felt the same. She knew what she had to do.
"Wait here," she said to Helen. "This door will be open, but don't go through it until you hear me call for you. Then bring everyone at once, as quickly as you can. Don't stop for anything. Especially not for me. Get up the stairs and out of the building; run down the street and out of the city. Go up into the hills and hide. I will find you." She paused. "If I don't come within the next few hours, head north toward San Francisco. You might find those from the other compounds on your way and you can join forces."
Helen started to speak, but Angel stopped her by taking hold of her arms and drawing her close. "Listen to me. There is something very bad at the top of the stairs. I don't think it cares about you or the children. I think it is looking for me. It won't let itself be distracted once it has me. Don't give it a reason to change its mind. Do you understand me?"