The Ukraine air was frosty cold. Pale fog clung to the ground, much like the stuff that had blanketed the United States, but denser. Darker. Strange sounds could be heard from sources unseen and impossible to guess at.

Then came the sound of a crow cawing. A large black bird flapped up to roost in the branches of an elm tree overgrow with thick green ivy. As Troy watched, it was joined by two more, all three sharing the same branch. They were big enough to bough the limb under their combined weight.

"Well, now," Michael said behind him.

"What?"

"He's here."

"Who? Where?"

Michael shut his eyes briefly and tuned in to other planes. He could see all sorts of ghostly entities scattered through the abandoned city. On another level, he could sense great power—and great pain. The source was one in the same and it radiated out from the half-built dome that incompletely covered a portion of the nearby nuclear reactor. The reactor had been defunct for decades and the process to upgrade the Sarcophagus, the concrete containment shell the government had built around the melted down core, had stopped before the world ended.

"There," he said, motioning in the general direction of the power plant.

Troy wasn't sure where he meant. Or who. It didn't really matter either. "Do you want to ditch the luggage somewhere? I don't think we're going to find a flophouse here."

"No. I might need something."

"Out here?" Troy boggled. He looked around. "It's dead here. We're not staying that long, are we? I mean, you know where we're going, right?"

"Yes, but I still want to keep my things with me."

Troy shook his head and shouldered his duffel. "It's your party."

Michael took the lead, dragging his black wheeled bag behind him. He cut a strange figure in the desolate wasteland, so finely dressed and accessorized. The absurdity of it all—the end of the world, Troy's own strange powers, following the Antichrist through the wastes—it felt like someone else's reality. And yet there he was, living that exact life.

"If you'd asked me as a kid what I thought things would be like when I was grown," he mused. "This is not what I would have imagined."

"What would you have imagined?" Michael prompted mildly.

"Something normal, I guess. Maybe not for me, but for the rest of the world. I think I always knew I was going to be something...something different."

Michael gave a short laugh. "Different. That's one way to put it."

"Pietre says I'm 'gifted', but I that's not a term I like. Reminds me of what people used to call the slow kids."

"Gifted," Michael echoed. He huffed another short laugh. "And was that while he was fucking you? Or after?"

Troy had been taking in the mist-choked forest that hugged the broken road they were following, but the comment pulled his attention back to Michael. The young man didn't break stride or look back.

"He's said it more than once," Troy responded just as casually. He had no idea what Michael's game was, but he could sense there was one. "Before, during, after. Whatever."

"I'm starting to think I haven't kept you busy enough."

"You know I'll do anything you want me to," said Troy earnestly. "Just say the word."

His loyalty did wonders to deflate Michael's passive hostility toward him. He knew Troy meant what he said, and suddenly Michael was annoyed at himself, for giving him a hard time when it was Pietre he was irritated with.

"We're going to meet a fallen angel soon," he said, bailing out on the whole subject in favor of another more pertinent one. "Be on guard. He's injured. That makes him particularly dangerous."

"You say that so casually."

"What?"

"That we're going to meet a fallen angel." Troy shook his head and looked back out at the silhouettes of skeletal trees in the fog. "Are we going to help him? Or finish him off?"

Michael didn't answer immediately. The silence stretched to the point of awkward before he finally admitted: "I don't know. We'll figure that out when we get there."

"I love a good plan," Troy said, not at all bitterly.

"I know you do."

—

Author's Note:

This is probably the shortest chapter I've done in a long time. I haven't had a lot of time for recreational writing, thanks to real-world writing deadlines. This is a mixed bag. It's great because it means that I'm actually writing screenplays now! But it is a bummer not to get to write just-for-fun stuff as much. It is a little strange to be writing an apocalyptic piece during the pandemic. I hadn't considered toilet paper issues, but now I wonder if Michael's got a Charmin hookup...

Next: Finding the Fallen. Will the boys help? Or harm? Is there another choice?