Keeping my eyes open hurt. Better yet, I felt the extra "eyes" on my face wake up. I don't know how I could describe the pain ... The closest comparison I can come up with is that someone had jabbed my face with a circle-shaped cookie cutter and began to manually reposition the small circles while ignoring the damage to the rest of my skin and fat and muscle ...
"We need to get out of here!" Nadine yelled over a howling wind that blew in from the cold ocean. Leo lifted me back up onto my feet and held me close against him. His strong arms hugged me tightly as if he were afraid to let go.
No. Wait. He was afraid. Reasonably so.
When I looked up at the morning's motionless Cloud, I saw the Apex swarm above us on chalky wings. Naked female bodies just hovering overhead. Amoral! But even as I squinted my blurry eyes at the nearing monsters, I got the feeling that calling them "female" was a projection of my planet's standards on things that were hardly Earthly.
Nadine stood right in front of Leo and me on the boardwalk.
"I don't like this," she mumbled, her attention on the sky.
"Me neither." I nodded, although my head felt blown up like a fat water balloon ready to burst.
We started walking backward up a set of stairs that led to the higher city road. I tripped a couple of times and each time Leo caught me.
"Where should we hide?" Leo asked in a quiet voice, leaning close to my ear. "Watch — They're closing in on the shore."
"Inside somewhere?" I offered, but the immediate doubt that I sensed in Leo's frown sent a wave of guilt through me. I guess it was a weak suggestion.
One of the winged fiends dived down on a panicked engineer leaving the boat later than his friends. Nadine and I screamed when his blond head detached from his shoulders, sliced through by a fleshy wing. We got up onto the road while screams beat us down on all sides. A few civilians hit us while running for their lives.
"There!" Leo pointed out a shoe store with the lights turned on inside. "Come on. Let's go!"
I followed him down the road toward the shoe shop, but halfway there I realized Nadine wasn't following us. I turned around and watched innocent victims, one after another, lose their lives to the attacking Apex.
Where was Nadine? My gut twisted in knots.
"Nadine!" I yelled, but I could hardly hear my own voice over the horrified crowd.
All the beasts nosedived into the crowd. I winced before they had even struck, anticipating head after rolling head.
Yet, this awful image in my mind did not come to fruition. Instead, a golden flash cut through the shadows and blocked every sight from my eyes. Then that flash of light faded, revealing a less compact crowd making space for the charred winged bodies of Apex lying dead on the road.
"They're gone?" Leo stood there behind me, breathless.
"Dead," I said, unable to tear my eyes away from the scene.
"But ... How?"
I had to ask myself the same question. Why, indeed. Then, the answer showed up. "Liza told us a story about how she discovered her marked arm could be used to defend against the Apex. Well ..." I gestured a still trembling hand out at the crowd, and a few people stepped far enough away that we could make out our new friend at the center of it all.
Nadine panted heavily, kneeling on her unmarked leg while her hands clung to her bare, eyeball-spotted leg. Her hair was a bit tossled and from here I could make out a sheen of sweat. But I saw more than exhaustion. She was grinning widely, dark eyes aglow, full of joy.
"Nadine saved us."
"Yeah? Then ... what's that?" Leo asked, a sudden sharpness in his tone.
I followed his finger up to the blackest Cloud, and I narrowed my eyes at a bright red speck that took shape miles high.
The red flashed white. My breath caught in my throat and the pressure on my body skyrocketed. It pushed me against the hard ground. making me eat dust.
That white light in the sky grew. It burned me.
Then, as if tonight couldn't get any stranger, that bright light flashed a pair of white, feathery wings.