Angels of Vengeance

She scrabbled at the handle of the door to the nearest taxi. The grip was so cold it frost-burnt her shaking hand. As she quickly climbed in and closed the door behind her, the contrasting warm air was almost unbearable at first. Her eyes watered, and the exposed skin on her face and hands felt like it had been scalded. She was going to need warmer clothing, and fast.

The cab driver was Indian. Most of them were. She’d learned from the Indian kids at school that many of the refugees working in the railway yards took second jobs at night, driving cabs mainly, or cleaning or doing whatever they could to scratch together a few newbies.

‘Good evening, Miss,’ said the driver.

‘I need to get out to the truck stop, the Flying J on Corrington,’ she said through chattering teeth. ‘Out by the power plant.’

The driver, a middle-aged man in a pale blue turban, looked like he was about to ask why a girl of her age would be heading out to Hawthorne at this time of night.

‘Can we get going?’ Sofia asked as she tried to rub some warmth back into her arms. ‘I’m late for my shift in the kitchen. They’ll dock me half a night’s pay if I’m even five minutes late.’ A complete lie, but explanation enough for a man most likely working his second job, a man who’d probably also had more than his fair share of unreasonable bosses.

He put the battered yellow cab into gear and they pulled away from the curb.

‘Were you visiting somebody in the hospital, Miss?’

A conversation was the last thing she wanted. But she had enough of her wits about her to know she shouldn’t draw attention to herself by snapping back unreasonably at his question.

‘Yes, I was sitting with a friend. She broke her arm and they’re putting a metal plate in it tomorrow.’

Again, she was surprised at how easily the lie came. Sofia closed her eyes and folded her arms, leaning her head back as though she wanted to sleep. She was still shivering. The driver took the hint and bothered her no more.

They moved onto Clay Edwards Drive, anticlockwise around the loop that would take them in front of the ER. She pulled the hoodie down over her head as they passed. No one ran out to stop the taxi. Surrendering to inertia as the car completed the long, slow turn, Sofia let her head roll over and loll on one shoulder, allowing her to peer out of the window, into the dark, bleak winter landscape. Snow was no longer falling, but it lay heavily on the ground, creating an eerie atmosphere similar to some accursed realm from a children’s fairytale, in which evil spirits had eaten all the light and warmth of the world.

She was still numbed by the drugs the nurses had given her. Not physically. As soon as she’d started moving around, in fact, she had quickly recovered her equilibrium, and tonight’s brutal wind chill sort of helped too. The Siberian Express, having sharpened itself on the frozen wastes of the Missouri River Valley, had sliced through her when she left the building, honing all of her senses.

Sofia’s psyche, however, was numb, allowing her to reflect on her father’s death as well as the idea of poor Maive Aronson plugged via a tangle of tubes into the life-support machines in intensive care. She wished she’d been able to say goodbye to Maive. But she could afford no regrets.

Sofia Pieraro was not a stupid girl. She realised that something far worse than regret lay ahead for her. She knew that howling grief and loss and a feeling of tumbling end over end into a pitch-black chasm all awaited her soon enough.

At fifteen, she was not the simple farm girl she would surely have grown up to be had the Wave not arrived to sweep destruction across the globe. She would cope with whatever came, because she always had. She remembered very little else in her life. Sofia Pieraro had escaped the first moments of la colapso when Acapulco fell into madness. She had sailed halfway around the world, battling pirates. She had worked on the refugee farms in Australia, and gone to school there with children whose stories were every bit as fantastic as her own. She had helped make the family farm in Texas, the one the federales had told them would be theirs forever one day, into a great success. She had seen that promise snatched away by Blackstone’s road agents. She had seen her family murdered. She had trekked over a thousand miles with her father and Maive and her people. She had survived more banditry on the way, and the great flood, constant deprivation, and once even an attack from a giant pack of wolves on the outskirts of Tulsa. Sofia Pieraro might have appeared to be nothing more than a young girl to somebody like this taxi driver, but she had lived and learned enough for four or five lifetimes in the last four or five years alone.

She would survive her grief. But Jackson Blackstone would not survive her determination to settle with him.

*

The cab struggled down Highway 210, west towards Interstate 435. The driver took his own sweet time, saying he was fearful that the snow-clotted roads might pitch him into the median, where they could run out of gas and freeze to death. Sofia shrugged. She’d heard that freezing to death was not a bad way to go if you had to go.

Once on the I-435 Missouri River Bridge, the young girl in the dark hoodie sat up, tensing her body, willing the car not to slide off into the river. The driver’s knuckles were tight on the steering wheel, the only vehicle in the southbound lanes at that time of night. A lone Humvee crawled along northbound, in the direction of one of the casinos the government had converted to dormitories. Covered over in plastic canvas, the poor souls in that vehicle would be frozen to the bone.

Once they had cleared the river bridge, Sofia slipped into a brief, fitful slumber, losing just a few minutes. She woke when the taxi bounced through a deep pothole in the tarmac, opening her eyes to the sight of the all-night diner at the Flying J truck plaza. Fairy lights and yellow neon bathed the interior of the cab, casting a sick, malarial pallor over her skin and disorienting her for a moment. Startled awake, she had the unpleasant sensation of not knowing where she was and then recalling the events of the previous evening anew - Papa, no! - before scolding herself for dozing off when she was so vulnerable. For one brief moment, she was about to cry, but she managed to stuff her feelings back into the tight little container she stowed them in.

The truck stop was busy with all manner of vehicles, military and civilian. Most of the truck drivers were probably wary about pushing out into the ink-black night, where petty criminals waited to pick them off if they didn’t travel with their assigned military escort. Here and there, small knots of men and women stood outside in the brutal cold, smoking and clapping their hands together.

‘Here we are,’ said her driver. ‘I hope you do not get in trouble for being late. I drove as fast as I could.’

‘S’okay,’ said Sofia.

He pulled up directly in front of the door to the recently built diner, for which she was grateful. Although they had taken a good twenty minutes, the distance travelled was not great and the fare was only six dollars fifty. Newbies did go a long way. She didn’t tip and the driver seemed to think nothing of it. Now that everybody was scratching to survive on the minimum federal wage, no one had anything to spare. She’d just spent half of every dollar she possessed.

Sofia thanked him and hopped out, hurrying towards the humid, greasy heat of fried food behind the sliding doors. In the short time she was exposed to the cold, she felt like the skin was being flayed from her body with dull iron knives. The oily, metallic stench of diesel in the air propelled her to the warmth inside. She had no idea how the smokers did it. They were banished so far from the gas stop, they must have been exposed to the full, bitter fury of the weather.

Addiction, she thought. A killing weakness.

Once through the doors, the smell was all fat, fried meat, salt and sugar. Gringo music, stupid with drums and crunching guitars, crackled out of speakers fixed high on the wall above the counter. Heads turned in her direction as she entered, a few of the men not bothering to look away, or even have the decency to be embarrassed, when she caught them staring at her lecherously. It was wrong. As a good Catholic, she marvelled at their lack of shame. A small part of her, the lost little girl she had once been, wanted to turn around and run away. But inside her mind, she found that little girl and quietly, methodically, shoved her into a small, dark box for the duration. There would be no time for weakness and sorrow on this trip. She had nothing to run to and nobody to protect her. She had to push through with this.

Sofia was not hungry, which was just as well. The food looked awful. Pre-made hamburgers bundled up in wax paper sat inside glass hot boxes, leaking grease through their wrapping. She was about to buy a bottle of water until she noticed an old aluminium tray near the cash register, piled high with glasses and a water jug. After