The Last Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

goth.

    “There was this woman,” I said. “Around the corner from us. She went crazy, throwing all this stuff out the window.”

    “ Sí .” Luz nodded. “That is the sickness. It is spreading now. You are still careful, yes?”

    “Yep. No boys for me.” I put my hands up. Luz believed everything was because of too much sex—part of her religious thing. “But it looked like her own stuff. Not like when Minerva broke up with Mark, hating everything he’d given her.”

    “Yes, but it is the same. The sickness, it makes the infected not want to be what they were before. They must throw away everything to make the change.” She crossed herself— the change was what she was trying to prevent in Minerva.

    “But Min didn’t trash all her stuff, did she?”

    “Not so much . ” Luz fingered the cross around her neck. “She is very spiritual, not joined to things. But to people, and to la musica .”

    “Oh.” That made a kind of sense. When Minerva had cracked up, she’d thrown away Mark and the rest of Nervous System first. And then her classes and all our friends, one by one. I’d stuck with her the longest, until everyone hated me for staying friends with her, and then she’d finally tossed me too.

    That meant Moz had been right: the crazy woman had been getting rid of her own stuff, throwing her whole life out the window. I wondered how he’d known.

    I thought about the mirrors upstairs, all covered with velvet. Min didn’t want to see her own face, to hear her own name—suddenly it all made sense.

    Luz touched my shoulder. “That is why it is good you are here. I think maybe now, Pearl, you can do more than I.”

    I felt the music player in my pocket, loaded up with Big Riff. I couldn’t do anything myself—I wasn’t some kind of skull-wielding esoterica—but maybe this fexcellent music . . .

    Luz started up the stairs, waving for me to follow.

    “One more thing: I think I saw angels.”

    She stopped and turned, crossing herself again. “ Angeles de la lucha? They were fast? On the rooftops?”

    I nodded. “Like you told me to watch for around here.” “And they took this woman?”

    I shrugged. “I don’t know. I got the hell out of there.”

    “Good.” She reached out and stroked my face, her fingers rough and smelling of herbs. “It is not for you, the struggle that is coming.”

    “So where do the angels take you?” I whispered.

    Luz closed her eyes. “To somewhere far away.”

    “What, like heaven?”

    She shook her head. “No. On an airplane. To a place where they make the change firm in you. So you can fight for them in the struggle.” She took my hand. “But that is not for you—not for Minerva. Come.”

     
    The rest of the way up, there were lots of new decorations to check out. The stairway walls were covered with wooden crosses, a thousand little stamped-metal figures nailed into each one. The figures were nonweird shapes—shoes, dresses, trees, dogs, musical instruments—but the wild jumble of them made me wonder if someone had put normality into a blender, then set it on disintegrate.

    And of course there were the skulls. Their painted black eyes stared down at us from the shadows, every floor a little darker as we climbed. The windows up here were blacked out, the mirrors draped with red velvet. Street noises faded as we climbed, the air growing as still as a sunken ship.

    Outside Minerva’s room, Luz bent to pick up a towel from the floor, sighing apologetically. “It is only me tonight. The family are more tired every day.”

    “Anything I can do to help?” I whispered.

    Luz smiled. “You are here. That is help.”

    She pulled a few leaves from her pocket, crushing them together in her hands. They smelled like fresh-cut grass, or mint. She knelt and rubbed her palms on my sneakers and the legs of my jeans.

    I’d always kind of rolled my eyes at her spells before, but tonight I felt in need of protection.

    “Maybe you will sing to