Dogs of the Father: A Legion Fanfiction - Episode 1: Little Prophet

Chapter 3

"Michael!" Audrey stomped through the burning sand in the ridiculous high heels she'd habitually worn for the past few years. "Michael!!!"

Nothing answered but the wind.

"Michael?" Audrey kicked the upturned police car and yelped in pain as the impact reverberated through her foot. "Michael! I know you're watching!" Her foot throbbed. What in hell had possessed her to ever take a liking to such impractical shoes?

A yawning silence blanketed the desert as her heartbeat drowned out the sound of the absent wind. Not even a coyote howled in the distance. Not a cricket. Not a mosquito. There was no sound here at all, just the scent of the creosote bush and a dry, dusty clay which filled her mouth with grit. Goddammit! She was stranded in the middle of nowhere with a goddamned wounded homicidal archangel.

"Screw you!" She threw the bible she'd just found underneath the seat of the police cruiser down into the reddish-beige sand. She kicked sand over it. "If you think I'm going to read this shit, you're sadly mistaking!"

A clicking noise caught her attention, but it was just a grasshopper, rubbing its wings as it hopped between creosote bushes. But it was life. Out here in the desert, you learned not to take that for granted.

"Hey, little fellow? I guess it's just you and me out here, all alone in the world." She pointed at the hiking trail which led around the mountain. "And him." By him, she referred to her unwanted charge, the one that had kept her stuck out here for the past five days, lingering at the brink of death.

She squatted down next to the creosote bush and held her hand out so the grasshopper could crawl onto her fingers. It's tiny, sticky feet gripped her skin. It stared up at her trustingly, tilting its head like a worshipper staring up at a crucifix.

"Why should –I- get stuck babysitting him?" she asked the grasshopper, since it was obvious Michael wasn't going to answer. "He's only going to die anyways. It serves him right for what he did. Tried to do. Actually, he really didn't do anything, just tried to do something. Jackass!"

The grasshopper jumped a short distance away, leaving her squatting like an idiot in high heels that had sunk into the sand. Her shoulders slumped.

"He wants to die. I don't know how to keep him alive..."

Her voice trailed off. When Michael had pulled the first aid kit out of the police cruiser, that right there should have been a warning about the mangled heap she would find at the base of the cliff. If not for the step-by-step pictorial Emergency First Responder Manual, she wouldn't have even known what to do. Oh, sure. They'd covered basic first aid in health class, but she'd skipped most of those classes, sneaking out to smoke cigarettes behind the girls' gym locker.

If only she hadn't been so rebellious!

"I know you're up there, Michael," Audrey pleaded. "And that you've been back here several times. That six-pack of Seven-Up didn't just appear in the police car on its own."

Or the granola bars. Or the yellowed, dog-eared Boy Scout Manual that had appeared a day after she thought she'd gleaned all the treasures from the trunk, dog-eared at the chapter which taught about desert survival. Or the dirty old tarp she'd propped up with a couple of sticks to make a crude lean-to to shield Gabriel from the frigid night wind and boiling daytime sun. Or the ghastly neon emergency blanket she'd tucked around him to keep him warm.

"I don't know what I'm doing," Audrey said, half to the grasshopper, half to the flawless blue sky. "I'm going to kill him because I don't know what to do."