Broken Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

pushed her chest-first up against the wall, making sure her face was turned away from the bright playroom.
    “You want to be the one who cooperates and walks away relatively unharmed?” Darryl asked.
    Before she could say anything, the boy in battle boots got back to his feet and rushed at them. Darryl squinted and concentrated, hitting the boy in multiple spots on his face, neck, and arms with bundles of infrared radiation. The boy fell to the floor, burned and unconscious.
    “It won’t be him,” Darryl said. “Or the vermin who’re trying to hurt my friend out there. We’re going to take them down. Hard. Find out what secrets you-all’ve been hiding. You’re the only one who’s being given a choice.”
    “Get out of our fuckin’ house…” The girl managed one complete sentence between grunting and struggling.
    “You lose your right to being left alone when you go after others—”
    “Didn’t go after nothin’…You ’tacked us!”
    “Take precious property that doesn’t belong to you,” Darryl continued, “keeping children from their proper guardians—”
    “Our parents live here!”
    Her words surprised him, but before asking any questions about her story, Darryl needed to know the ending to another.
    “I’m not talking about you,” he said. “I want to know where the redhead is. Marie-Lydia. I also want to know what you people—”
    “Darryl!”
    “What fuckin’ redhead?” the girl said.
    He’d heard the shout. Robert needed him. Now. But he couldn’t let the girl go free. She’d attack him again, no question. He had no choice. She was at least sixteen, seventeen years old. Practically an adult. She could take it.
    “You had your chance.”
    Darryl put his hand on just the right spot of the girl’s neck and twisted his wrist. She collapsed, unconscious.
    Darryl rushed into the poolroom and assessed the situation. The four thugs still had the table surrounded. Three of them were armed with pool cues. The fourth—the self-stuck pig—was wielding the same large knife. Robert was holding his own, jumping from one spot on the table to the next, trying to avoid the rolling billiards and, with less success, trying to avoid the swinging sticks. He was clearly having trouble keeping his senses and balance under control while in the thick of all the colorful globs.
    An average person might regard the disco ball’s lightshow as a welcome or even necessary aid for dancing and partying, but to almost any victim of the Virus, the radiation-shower could be nothing less than plain torture. Robert wouldn’t last much longer. Darryl saw the tear in his pants and the gash underneath. He knew what had triggered Robert’s call for help. With no bow and no corresq, Darryl also needed help.
    He took a deep breath, pulled off his T-shirt, and entered the lightshow.
    As expected, Darryl’s hypersensitive bare skin reacted to the exposure. The parasites inhabiting the upper layers of his skin were thrown into frenzy. For them, it was feeding time. Darryl concentrated and did what he could to keep them under control, trying his best to stay conscious as he used every inch of bare skin to manipulate the radiation that was violating him. Indigo pools of liquid-light gathered in his pores as most of the hairs on his skin seemed to stiffen and self-ignite. It felt as if the hairs were burning themselves out and laying down the remains in the indigo pools, and from the mixture, from the pores emerged a glistening substance, a viscous perspiration that tingled and burned his skin as it changed the skin’s appearance, its texture, seeming to convert Darryl’s epidermis into a thin shell, even as that shell—he felt—began to crack.
    Despite the excruciating pain, Darryl was in control.
    He extended his hands and redirected a good portion of the light beaming down from the sphere above. As the spinning ball used the bits and pieces of the environment to produce confounding blobs of color, Darryl used the