Free Archangel by Paul Watkins

changed direction.
    Gabriel walked past the zoo. The animals had been set loose. A hippopotamus walked by him down a sidestreet, swinging its head from side to side. Three giraffes ran, hooves clattering through a park and away down a road lined with burned-out businesses. An elephant walked slowly down the street, knocked softly on each door with its trunk. Gabriel wondered if it was part of some trick that the elephant had learned at the zoo, some man-taught ritual.
    Black rain fell on the city. Only pale and darkening shadows remained of places where cars had stood. Gabriel left his footprints in the empty streets, and when he turned to look at them, he had the feeling that he had walked into a parallel universe, where images remained like photographic negatives, all the light in them reversed.
    It was getting bright. Now that the dawn was finally arriving, Gabriel dreaded its approach. He had grown used to the night, which he felt convinced had lasted longer than half a dozen nights, and his watch and his eyes had conspired to cheat him of the daytime in between. With oil sweat-welded to his clothes and body and smeared obscenely in his hair, it was as if he had become a part of the darkness and he would never find his way back into the light. He felt pushed past the brink of his own sanity, and knew that even if he made his way to safety, a part of him would always be out there among the oil fires, lost in an atrocity of pollution and waste.
    He had stopped in a doorway to rest. He sat on his haunches, arms resting on his elbows. The dawn was gray around him. The colors had not yet returned.
    A window above his head burst into slivers and it seemed to Gabriel that the sound of the gunshot came afterward. Glass like hardened rain fell on his head and stuck in his hair. At first he just satthere, looking to see who had fired the shot. Then he scrambled through the doorway and into the house. As he ducked inside, another bullet zipped along the wall, tearing the wallpaper as if a knife had been drawn across it. The bullet vanished into the plaster, leaving a scorch mark. He ran through rooms, jumped over a bed and through a bathroom, and as he ran he heard a strange and muffled engine outside the building. Then voices. Then the thump of footsteps in the house. He heard Arabic being shouted. It sounded as if they were calling to him.
    He wished he had a gun, at least to take one of them with him. But the pilots had been cautioned against carrying sidearms because if they were shot down over enemy territory, it gave the people who found them an excuse to open fire.
    Gabriel ran into a room and there was no way out. Even the window was too small. It was a child’s room, with posters of cartoon figures on the wall.
    I’m going to die, he thought. They’re going to kill me. The knowledge came to him as an absolute fact. There wasn’t even a tremor of doubt. When he had thought about death before, he had always imagined it coming in a sheet of fire as his jet exploded, or the screaming free fall of a pilot whose chute has failed to open. But not this. Not dying in some child’s room in an empty chair with his pockets picked, being left to rot like the dead man in the street.
    He turned. They would catch him in the hallway. They would shoot him in the chest with their burp guns. He saw it so clearly that it was as if he had already been killed. There was no use running. The hallway or in here. Same difference. He raised his hands and stood there in the dark room, waiting to die and wishing only for it to be over quickly.
    The men rushed past the hallway. They were not talking now. He heard the rustle of their clothing and the soft pad of their boots on the carpeted floors. Gabriel knew they were on either side. Any second now, they’ll fill the hallway with bullets and rush me, he thought. Or throw a grenade. Just get it over with, he thought.
    A head wrapped in a wool cap jabbed around the corner and swung back again. More