Landing by J Bennett

Author:J Bennett [Bennett, J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J Bennett
Published: 2014-01-13T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Wetness dribbling between my breasts. A flash of red disappearing into the woods. Jane.

Oh god. Kyle. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

The wetness rolls down to my stomach. I think I might be hit. I don’t know. I can’t breathe.

Two discordant strides pound closer.

I push Kyle off me and twist onto my hands and knees. I don’t want to look, but I grab at my shirt and yank up. My hands are shaky as hell, and I can’t get the fabric over my head.

Visions dance in front of my eyes—ragged bullet holes in my chest; blood spewing out.

I pull, and the fabric rips. My fingertips follow the dark stain of blood down my chest.

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

A figure rushes behind me into the woods. The second set of steps comes to a halt.

“Maya,” Gabe puts a hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” I flinch away from him.

“You’re not hit…fuck, are you?”

“I don’t know.” My voice is edging toward hysteria. I’m blinking like a spaz, wheezing out tight breathes through my closed throat. I can’t feel my legs. Maybe I’m paralyzed. Wait, I can feel them, a little, I think.

Gabe reaches for me again.

“No! Just let me do it.”

Gabe takes a step back. He waits. I finish probing the blood trail — it’s not nearly so much blood as I thought at first — and find no bullet holes in my own flesh. I stand up, sway a little, and carefully wipe my lips and cheek. My hand comes back smeared scarlet. Kyle’s blood.

I take a deep, long breath. Kyle.

He lies at my feet, a halo of red around his heart and a dark quarter punched through his skull just above his left brow. Those misaligned features of his face are twisted even further out of harmony. His eyes are open and so is his mouth. Dark globules of brain fleck the exit wound in his forehead.

I go back down to my knees and slide his eyelids closed, because this is always what they do in the movies. For some idiotic reason, I can’t reconcile how he is dead when he was alive just moments ago. I keep expecting him to smile, to laugh.

Even after Ryan, after watching my brothers take down several other angels, I still don’t understand how something so big, so important, so solid as a personhood can be severed in a single moment. Maybe I should close Kyle’s mouth too, but a cold, heavy dread is filling my limbs, and I just can’t touch him again.

You killed people, I think to him as if in explanation. You were an angel. I’m so sorry.

I keep wiping at the blood on my face.

Tarren re-emerges from the woods.

“She’s gone,” he says.

I look around for the purple balloon, and finally find it, scraping along the ground a couple of yards away; struggling to stay afloat. It’s just a balloon. I know that.

***

My brothers argue.

“What the fuck were you thinking running after her like that?” Gabe whispers. Using his phone, he takes pictures of the postcard collage on Jane and Kyle’s wall.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.