“Kaito?” asked Abigail, from her perch up on the lamppost. I looked up, cricking my neck, and saw that she was stretching her wings.
Did I forget to mention that? Well, I didn’t do anything, I found her like that. With two very large black-feathered wings sticking out of her back. They’re alive and everything, and if you pull one of the feathers she screams like a banshee and sets after you to pull out your hair. She can fly too, in an unskilled, lopsided fashion.
Abby isn’t the only one gifted. I woke up from the Night with gills, scales and webbed feet. And I can breathe underwater. Not that great, really, since my scales itch like the dickens and my gills sting every time I step into the water. That’s partly my fault, for trying out my skills in the River Thames. That water is toxic sludge; don’t let it get close to your skin.
I don’t know where I got them. The first time I saw them, they were initially under a layer of peculiar blue bandages. Abigail says that her shoulders and back were also heavily bandaged when she'd woken up from the Night, as were most of her wings. We’d come to the conclusion that somebody had grafted these in, but for who and why I had no idea.
Till then, they were some pretty cool upgrades.
“Yeah?” I responded, from my place on the park bench. We always slept in parks or trees, since rooms smaller than a mini-hall made Abigail feel claustrophobic. Easy when there’s ten extra feet of you on either side, I suppose, but that didn’t change the fact that the steel had frozen my butt through. I wouldn't have guessed that Lebanon got all this cold, for its location.
“If you’re hungry, we could go eat.” Abigail never said she was hungry. Maybe it made her feel bad to think so much of herself, or maybe she was on an unsuccessful diet, but I didn’t mind. A midnight snack was unlike her, though; she believed in the three-meal rule. Was it morning already?
Shafts of sunlight lit up the horizon, making the buildings glitter. She'd won again. I’d had no idea it was so close to sunrise. As for how she knew, search me.
We walked/flew to a hypermarket outside the park. The lights were already on inside, and we went in. It was quieter than a graveyard, the only noises being the occasional creak of a fan in the ventilation or a gurgle in the underground pipes. The place smelled unused and old, like an old library. Flies congregated at the meat and vegetables, or what was left of them. The cashiers slept on their counters, and shoppers were curled up beside their trolleys, all wrapped up like mummies. Honestly, even after five months, they were still a little creepy.
Abigail started searching for healthy things that hadn’t rotted yet. Which grew tougher by the day. The freezers worked, which mean that frozen stuff was always an option, but fresh food was out of the question. Hail the can opener.
“What about prunes today?” she asked, waving a tin. I made a face, and she replaced it, taking a box of cereal from the opposite aisle. “It’s cereal, then,” she said. “The routine thing.”
We usually had cereal for breakfast. Available at nearly every city we’d traveled through, we could finish off a box between ourselves. Abigail used up serious amounts of energy while flying, so she needed to replace it in every meal. I just eat a regular breakfast of cereal with that weird type of milk you get when you mix water and milk powder from a can.
“What does the radio say?” asked Abigail. I obediently ran over to the parts of the market that sold small electronic devices and selected a wireless radio. I brought it over to her, snatching a few batteries on the way and slipping them in. An Arabic song began to play once I switched it on, most probably a Nancy Ajram. My mom had liked her songs, even if she didn’t understand the words.
“What was the frequency, again?” I asked.
“Hundred-and-seven point seven,” said Abigail. I rotated the dial till the little red marker nearly touched 108, then carried it outside.
Almost immediately, an unearthly moaning mumbling wail started up. It was a human voice, definitely, but it sent chills down your spine. If this noise were used in a horror movie, all those underage kids watching it would have nightmares, irrespective of what they had watched before. Abigail took it from me, wincing, and readied herself for flight. She usually took off from a crouch, leaping into the air and beating hard at the air till she gained the height she wanted. After that it was just gliding and the occasional broken flap.
She circled around in the sky, trying to determine the direction in which the wails were stronger. Somehow I didn’t think we should have been going towards something that sounded so disturbing, but blame curiosity. Anything human that wasn’t mutant or frozen would be great.
When Abigail landed, I knew I felt the ground shake. She never landed, per se. She came in flapping like her life depended on it, and ended up screeching to a stop backside first. The radio was safe in her arms, still moaning and mumbling. I took it from her and twirled the dial to another station, where some weird pipe music was playing.
“Which direction?” I asked.
“South-east,” she said, breathless. “I don’t know how I knew that, but south-east it is.”
“You’re half-bird,” I said. “Maybe you have an internal compass, or something.”
“These wings were grafted in,” she said, heaving herself to her feet and wheeling her arms. “I wasn’t born like this.” She was breathing rather heavily, I noticed. Wasn’t she getting enough air or something? I knew that her wings took a lot of energy to maintain, so could it be possible that they weren’t getting enough oxygen?
It was a worrying thought, but I didn’t say anything.
“Get a truck or something,” ordered Abigail. “We’re moving. This infernal cold’s getting to me.” I saluted, grinning, and ran down the street to the nearest parking lot. Abigail was still herself, and I was worrying too much.
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