One would be hard-pressed to find a sun in the city sky, but everyone squinted against the day’s cold glare, all the same. Life’s only refuge in this city was the street. The sky above was featureless white, and empty. It seemed to rest on top of the crumbling buildings, also empty. Harvey walked eyes-down and nudged a dead bird with his foot, trying to remember when he had last seen anything fly in the city.

With one cracked leather boot eclipsing the feathered husk, Harvey stopped and slipped a thin square of paper from the diminishing sheaf in his jacket pocket. A handful of people navigated around him; pedestrian in every sense, like himself. From another pocket he drew a pinch of crumbling tobacco and spread it along the paper’s crease, watching a gang of children across the street harass some hulking, hunch-backed crone. Truth be told, their victim could have been male; its misshapen form was buried beneath a cloak of filthy rags, with no feature of either sex in view. Still, Harvey’s mind insisted that the giant was feminine.

As the children knocked the old woman about, Harvey glimpsed gleaming white through the rags on her back. A small girl, pretty but for her filthy face and its fixed expression of hate, saw the same. Giving the hag one final kick, she pulled away and shrieked. Wincing at the shrill sound, Harvey cupped one hand around his mouth and lit a match, dragging deep. If there had been words, they were lost at his distance, but Harvey understood the child’s meaning well enough, as did her seemingly ancient victim. A crone no longer, the woman straightened, white wings thrown wide upon her back. Harvey thought he saw the sun’s light in that moment she stood tall, but the children fell upon her and searing gloom reclaimed the day.

Averting his eyes, he saw only empty sidewalk, and the acid stirred in his stomach. The whole scene joined dozens like itself in the deepest cellars of his battered mind, where it could cry out for examination all day long, to no avail. He shuffled onward, eager to find the crowd again and disappear. It was no good to stand out; drama could only lead to tragedy.

To the right, a blur of motion in an alley caught his eye, and Harvey dropped to the ground. Yesterday would have been a good day to give up smoking. One cheek to the pavement, he saw three twisted figures touch earth before him and then bound overhead toward their winged prey. Their speed and restless nature made details of form hard to fix, but the impression they left was familiar: they were gray-brown, chitinous and gangling, with a plethora of sharpened edges bristling from the hide.

Climbing to his feet, Harvey saw the fugitive burst from beneath the squealing mound of children in a shower of feathers, rags, and blood. In a panic, she launched herself from atop the squirming heap, her strange new pursuers skidding through the pack where she had been, leaving two of the children motionless in their own blood. Their companions were unfazed. Harvey watched her wings beat once, twice, and once more, straining to be free of the earth. She stalled, level with the second-story windows of the concrete shell at her back, and voiced a shriek, high pitched and loud, echoing through the urban canyon. Even the beasts beneath her ceased their twitching, and for a moment the street was a frieze of the various monsters. The atrophied wings of a pedestrian angel could only carry her so far, and the woman plunged in an arc, impotent and naked, sailing roughly into Harvey’s arms.

The tangled duo tumbled with some force into the alley, sprawling in a parody of desire amidst the urban filth. Before they had even considered rising, a filthy four-year-old pounded down the stretch of barren asphalt shrieking hatred like some bird of prey, sank its teeth into the winged woman’s breast. Her cry of pain sent shocks through Harvey’s head and penetrated what was left of his heart.

Filled with disgust for the bestial little shit, he felt his foot moving before he could think. The kick connected solidly, and the young boy sailed through the air like an acrobat, turning once end-over-end before skidding to a halt amongst its peers. The body left a bright, bloody smear behind it. Children and beasts packed the mouth of the alley, and at Harvey’s back, the woman rose and fled. Two of the creatures pushed through the throng, moving past him in pursuit, but the third remained, pawing the motionless child and gazing up at Harvey with a cold, predatory hunger. All they have to do is notice you. The beast leapt and Harvey dove, cringing as the tip of a bone-hard claw slid harmlessly over the back of his jacket. Hurling one child behind him to slow pursuit, Harvey trampled the rest in his flight, and kept running.

The hours that followed passed in a haze of rooftops, back-alleys, and urine-soaked hallways. The sky grew darker, the air colder, but the chase wore on. Each time Harvey stopped to rest, seeking shelter from the deadly night, the scrape of a claw or a deep-throated growl would sound at his back, driving him on, running, cursing angels, devils, and children. Finally exhaustion won out over caution, and he stepped out from one last rooftop into nothing.

Harvey woke to a rectangle of brightening sky, neatly framed in rusting metal. Slowly, he dragged himself upright in the ancient Dumpster, wishing for a cigarette as dark waves of pain reminded him of the unscheduled flight that had landed him here. Taking stock of his surroundings, he inhaled sharply at the sight before him: the winged woman from the alley lay not ten yards away, bathed in the glow of an unbroken loading-bay light, itself a small miracle in these dark city ruins. Harvey’s urban angel, however, had not weathered the night so well. Her naked body was torn and broken, her wings wadded like paper and clotted with blood.

The scene reminded Harvey of newscasts from years ago, before everything had spun out of control. When the winged enigmas descended from the skies, moving silently through the world with no discernible purpose, he was young, a student. He had forgotten just what he studied several years ago. The wandering angels seemed almost in shock as the human throngs trailed them, stroking wings and naked flesh in search of blessings. It seemed the creatures took no notice, staring off into some middle distance, oblivious to the pleas and probing hands of their followers. Several fell to human assailants. Then, days or weeks after the first beings fell from the sky, something darker crawled out of the earth. These new beasts caught the angels’ attention, and it seemed the world belonged to them. Ignoring humanity as completely as their predecessors, these creatures stalked the earth hunted only by the media who filmed one feathered corpse after another as it fell to earth, often in several pieces.

The crowds fled their martyrs and hid in their homes, praying for deliverance, but on every channel and out in the streets, for those who dared to leave their homes, all that could be seen was the rending of flesh: wings tearing, heads splitting as the beasts went about their work. Eventually it seemed there were no more angels to be found, and the predators turned to more mundane quarry.

Now, the world was their hunting ground. They appeared in the cities, the forests, lakes and farmland; everywhere. When the military came in, it was slaughter. The beasts simply showed themselves, took down one man, maybe two, and the guns came out. In a matter of weeks, human corpses lined the streets, more of them covered with bullet holes than claw marks, and what was left of the forces busied themselves cleaning up the bodies. Like most people, Harvey left home only to go to the grocery store, but then the grocer was gone, the shelves emptied, and he started walking. He was pretty sure all modern dreams fell into one of two categories; the only things left to wish for were survival and death.

But here beneath the glare of a lone electric bulb, Harvey glimpsed something new. At the angel’s feet lay one assailant, split wide and eviscerated, bathed in black blood. One of its companions lay in a stinking heap beside the Dumpster, rivaling the foul odor of long-putrefying trash, and the last was smeared like an insect on a nearby wall. The angels’ first coming had brought many people hope, then with the arrival of their counterparts, hope had been defeated, but this scene stirred emotions Harvey had thought long dead. This might not be a victory for hope, but it sure was one hell of a draw.

Crawling gingerly from his Dumpster, Harvey staggered to the woman’s side. Clumsily, he groped for her hand, but instead of cold death, he found heat pouring off the broken body like a furnace. Incredibly, her eyelids fluttered, and two chocolate-brown orbs turned in his direction. She was near death, she should have been dead already, but those eyes were clear, the most lucid he had ever seen. Under that gaze, he felt an unreasonable hope rising in his chest, pushing aside the detritus of what seemed to have been a lifetime spent walking, dead. For the first time in years he felt a sense of purpose, though what that purpose might be, he did not know.

Her left hand found his neck and pulled him down, her right reaching out toward his chest. His breastbone parted as easily as his lips, and as his mouth met hers, he felt probing fingers touch his heart. Incredible pressure was building inside of him, all pain forgotten as his shirt and jacket burst at the seams. His momentary lover fell back, lifeless, having penetrated him much more deeply than he had ever touched a woman,. With her blood in his mouth and his heart in her hand Harvey shook off the remnants of his tattered clothes. Spreading his wings, he flew into the rising sun.