Page 82 of The End of the World As We Know It

Angel’s voice, guttural now. Her constriction traps Silvia’s limbs against her sides. She bucks and kicks, but Angel’s weight thrusts down on her lap, pinning her to the floor.

“Easy, girl,” Angel says, and her tone is a blade on velvet again. “You might want my life, but I’m not after yours. Just need a little help crossing the country.” Zipper teeth unlatch—Silvia’s pack. “Go back to your dreams, my nameless clown.”

“Get away from that!” Silvia snaps. She squirms against what must be a thin rope beneath Angel’s powerful body.

“That cut between my fingers?” Angel says. “There’s no one left to invent a solution for problems like that on the East Coast. But out west? Where people gather? Maybe there’s a way. A future for mankind.”

Sloshing sounds—Angel’s hands feel over Silvia’s belongings before finding one of the water jugs and setting it on the floor. She must not have slept, letting her eyes adjust to the dark while Silvia’s can hardly see at all. Silvia rummages in her sleeping bag, along her striped pants.

Angel rolls over, a nothing shape in the dark, and something wet and flat strokes Silvia’s cheek. “See? No harm done. That old bug’s finished hunting. But you’re one of those yesterday types, only seeing the past.”

Silvia’s fingertips touch metal—there.

“Poor scared thing,” Angel says. “I’d take you west if you’d come. You’d under—”

A gunshot thrusts up from the sleeping bag, briefly lighting Angel’s middle. She curls inward and hits the floor hard with a hiss of frantic breath.

Silvia kicks until the roped sleeping bag loosens from her body. She abandons it, grabbing her pack and dashing around the counter. Her gun-wielding hand bangs the corner, and she’s lucky it doesn’t waste her last shot before she feels her way toward the door.

“You’ll kill yourself!” Angel snaps through clenched teeth. “You got me, but you got you, too. She’s out there.”

Silvia doesn’t know what that means. Angel groans with earth-deep hurting, reminding Silvia of a lowing steer. And of Helena.

She could use her remaining bullet on a mercy killing, but Angel’s next groan pushes her out the door, into the torrent of wind and rain. She can’t stand that agonized sound, can’t stand being inside the gas station, and she needs to change clothes. New encounter, new outfit. Let Angel’s soul tell Captain Trips to hunt a clown.

Silvia will be a magician.

The gas station door clacks shut behind her at the next lightning flicker, brightening the world except where black stripes haunt the road’s edge.

Silvia stiffens. Her eyes fix on that gravelly dip, but there’s onlydarkness beneath a quaking roar. Is that the storm rumbling, or something else?

No, what else could there be? Silvia must’ve imagined whatever she thinks she almost saw. But she holds still anyway, waiting as the storm drenches her and the wind bats dampening hair across her nose and lips.

The next lightning flash catches bright yellow eyes, rushing toward her.

She sees them clearly in this blinking light, through the un-dream of Angel’s beacon and the heartache of Helena, remembering the man Silvia gunned down near the trees.

Somebody let her out.

But he didn’t mean Angel asher. He meant Angel assomebody. And who was Angel?

I’m an Angel of Liberty. I believe in freedom.

Parts of our world depend on us. Farmland. Oil rigs.

Zoos.

Large feline eyes loom in fascination. They know secrets, have faced down death, the universe, predator acknowledging predator.

Somebody let her out.

Silvia lets her pack slide away as she reaches one hand for the door. With her other hand, she aims the pistol into the thunderous darkness.

Several hundred pounds of apex predator slam her against the gas station door with all the gentleness of a truck as her gun goes off, its blast meek against the feral roar. Glass paneling cracks, and bones crack with it, and Silvia smacks the wet asphalt on her right side.

The world turns briefly quiet beneath the pounding rain. Everything hurts, from Silvia’s back to her empty hands. Where’s the gun? She’s lost it, and it’s useless anyway after that last shot.

Maybe she got lucky and wounded the tiger. Even killed her. If only another tongue of lightning would lick the night and reveal the gas station’s lot again, filled by a striped corpse.