Filaria - Brent Hayward [67]
Deidre turned to pull apart nearby sticks, to better watch the airships’ progress through the gap she made. “Can’t you see it, Mingh straw? Look.” She spoke as if Mingh straw was the child and she, Deidre, was the adult. She took the girl’s hot arm. “Can’t you see it? They’re coming to save us. Everything is going to be all right.”
Gleaming as it rose, turning flank toward her in ponderous yet graceful motion, the craft of the rescuers neared. An insignia, red and blue, almost impossible to make out from this distance — though she was sure she’d seen it before, and knew its detail, on sealed documents brought to Elegia — emblazoned the rudder.
In a very quiet voice, Deidre confided, “I only noticed their penises because I’m a scientist. That’s all. A scientist.”
At least three angels circled the airship out there, appearing in size and form as they had when Deidre had first seen them from the picnic site a lifetime ago, a world away.
Orbiting the dirigible, diving at it swiftly, pulling out at the last moment or occasionally holding place directly over the top of the craft, to hover uncertainly there, the angels clearly did not know how to deal with this threat.
And so, one by one, the creatures plummeted from sight, shot down, dead. Silently Deidre cheered, though she also felt a remote sadness, a surprising empathy for the angels whose source she could not understand; the beasts did not seem much smarter than moths.
Deidre’s eyes narrowed. It was a cruel world. She knew that. Nature was impartial, reality harsh. Part of the order of things. But would she stick a pin through an insect again, if she had the luck to survive this ordeal, and again be given the choice? Would she ask Sam for the unfortunate owner of an archived spiral to be retrieved from the library, resurrected from extinction so she could kill it all over again? The idea of her specimen jar sickened her a little now and she wondered if ghosts of all the insects she had ever put into it were gathering together, watching her perils with grim satisfaction, siding with their winged brethren as they, too, succumbed to the nasty humans.
“Confession time, sweet ass?” Mingh straw’s voice was slurred but insistent, as if Deidre’s comment about the angels’ genitalia had percolated down through layers of troubled perception to revive her. While Deidre watched the uneven battle, Mingh straw spoke once more:
“Is it time for true confessions? All right, then, sugar tits, all right. What I believe is that these monsters brought you here because they weren’t happy with me. As a specimen. Because I’m broken and sick and they know it. They wanted another girl. A younger girl. A prettier girl. And I can — Look out!”
Something hit Deidre hard, from the side, lifting her completely off the nest and carrying her out into the open air. The landscape below suddenly filled her vision with a rush, and in the initial moment, winded, she wondered if an explosion had occurred, or if she were mortally hurt, about to plummet, but by the time her wits began to return to her she realized that she was dangling high over the ruined world, in excruciating pain, being carried off once more through the skies.
An angel — the black one — had her in its talons, and was flapping away from the aerie.
No pretence of being gentle this time. She was not gripped between the beast’s knees; claws fully pierced the muscles of her shoulders, clinging to the bone beneath. She felt them scraping at her skeleton. From under her torn shirt, hot blood trickled, dripping down onto the land like a baptism. What came out of her mouth was not a scream. The talons tightened; the world grew dim.
She turned her head to see if the airship was changing course to come get her, but saw instead a white angel directly behind her, with Mingh straw hanging from its grip. The other girl was fighting, writhing, reaching up to hit the angel again and again and grab at its wiry thighs as the creature struggled to remain airborne with its load.