Angelfall

Penryn guides her family through the wreckage of their city, past graffitied angels and poems and past their condo entrance, which has a feather nailed to the door as a warning. The feather has been dipped in red paint as a sign of a gang claiming territory. The family continues, using cars and bushes for cover, and their journey proceeds quickly and in relative safety. El Camino Real is covered with abandoned cars in a dead gridlock, and they walk over abandoned smartphones on the road, which Penryn considers the primary sign that the apocalypse is happening.

In one car, Paige finds an energy bar, which they split into thirds; Penryn and her mother split their portions in half and give those back to Paige, to her disappointment. Paige has been a vegetarian since she was three, but now the scarcity of food has forced her to give up her dietary restrictions. A flyer from an apocalypse cult flies by as they eat.

As they travel on, a large white down feather lands on Paige, to their terror. Penryn is confused; the angels have been targeting only the major cities, not places like Silicon Valley. A larger feather floats down, and they all begin to run, trying to hide behind cars. Suddenly, an angel descends and crushes a car underfoot; Penryn stares, having never seen an angel in the flesh before. She has only seen footage of angels being shot down or murdering people in major cities.

Five angels swoop down on the white-winged angel standing near Penryn. One of them is gigantic, with different-looking wings, although all the angels have wings of assorted colors. All of them resemble shirtless men with different skin tones. All the angels have two-foot-long swords; the white-winged angel—Raffe—has dropped his, and the largest angel kicks it away from him. Penryn sits back to watch them swarm and kill Raffe, sensing history between him and the group. The angels slice off Raffe’s wing, showering everyone with blood, and the big angel stomps on the wounds and drops the wings on the ground. As he goes for the second wing, however, Paige makes a sound of pity, and the large angel charges toward them.

Penryn shouts for her mother and Paige to run, but her mother runs off without Paige, forcing Paige to wheel herself to safety. Penryn sprints for the giant angel while the other angels slice off Raffe’s remaining wing. She grabs Raffe’s abandoned sword, which is lighter than she expected, and throws it to him. It lands eerily perfectly in his hand and Raffe immediately attacks the giant angel, slashing his stomach, but just as the combat turns in their favor, the giant angel backhands Penryn and sends her flying. The giant angel takes off, and Raffe collapses.

As Penryn recovers, she looks up and sees the giant angel circling Paige. She runs for her sister, but the giant angel descends and grabs Paige, mocking Penryn’s efforts to grab her. He disappears into the distance with Paige in hand.

Penryn looks for her mother, even though she doesn’t want to. She cannot find her and doesn’t remember if she saw anything happen to her, but she reassures herself that her mother’s paranoid schizophrenia will help her stay alive. Penryn feels watched; she knows that angel wings have a high price on the underground market, and anyone watching wants to grab them. She realizes that Raffe is still alive, and despite her doubts about his chances, she goes to tend to him, hoping he can tell her where Paige is.

She slaps him and demands information, but his condition prevents him from getting words out, so she finds a first aid kit and bandages his back. She lifts him successfully into Paige’s wheelchair—his body is light, but she pretends he is heavy so that anyone watching will think she is strong—and wraps the wings in a blanket, hoping to use them for currency later. She then runs into the night with Raffe, the sword, and the wings in tow.

Penryn drags Raffe to an office building, one of many identical ones in Silicon Valley, and hides them both in a corner office, using a corpse in the entryway as a deterrent to others. She places Raffe on the couch, but his condition rapidly deteriorates over two days. Penryn finds food in the office’s kitchen and a shower, but she is unable to fully enjoy the new luxuries due to her missing family.

Penryn tries to stabilize the angel with aspirin and water, but he remains unconscious. She yells at him and kicks the couch, and to her surprise, he wakes up. She interrogates him quickly, but he closes his eyes, and she slaps his wounded back to wake him back up. He insists that Paige is dead, but Penryn refuses to accept this answer. She unfurls his wings and promises he can have them back if he helps her. Raffe is skeptical and goes back to sleep. Penryn decides she needs to find a way to confine him in case she must torture him for information.

Penryn finds that the corpse in the entryway has been desecrated with makeup and a kitchen knife, and she immediately identifies the handiwork as her mother’s. She describes her mother’s rapidly fluctuating mental condition, which worsened after Penryn’s father left them and the apocalypse began. Her mother is singing in the office shower; Penryn reminisces on the song, remembering how her mother used to sing it to her and Paige when she was recovering from an episode. During her episodes, she often became abusive toward her daughters, and the song was an attempt to soothe them and ask for forgiveness. Paige was alone with their mother when she lost the use of her legs, and their mother blames herself for whatever might have happened to her, but Penryn does not know the truth.

Penryn approaches the shower and asks her mother how she found her, and her mother admits with shame that a “demon” told her. Penryn accepts this, but her mother warns her that she had to promise the demon something in exchange, a dark warning for her future behavior. Penryn orders her mother to stay out of the corner office and not to leave the building. Her mother agrees, so long as Penryn agrees to wear the stars sewn into all their clothing as a “safety” precaution.

Penryn reminisces on how quickly she had to grow up, even though she is only 17. Paige lost the use of her legs at age two, and their mother insisted Penryn take extensive self-defense lessons afterward, accruing thousands of dollars of debt to do so. Their mother saves a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about mentally ill mothers harming their children, and when Penryn finds it, she grimly determines never to miss a self-defense session.

Penryn takes food and locks herself in the office. She duct-tapes the sleeping Raffe in an uncomfortable position, waking him up; she then holds scissors to the feathers on his wings and demands information. He mocks her for her attempts to insult him, and she cuts several feathers in response; he immediately grows angry and threatens her, and she cuts more feathers in response. Penryn grows briefly distracted by her mother asking if she is all right, and in seconds, Raffe breaks the bindings, takes the scissors, and tries to choke her. She jumps backward and slams them both into the wall; they tussle while Penryn’s mother tries to break into the room.

Eventually, mutually injured and unable to continue fighting, they call a truce. Penryn convinces her mother to leave, and Raffe falls asleep again. Penryn chains Raffe to a metal cart to confine him again, then curls up and falls asleep, but she wakes up to glass breaking and Raffe telling her to be quiet.