Dawn brought new terrors. From a distance, an eerie creaking sounded: the power grid's death rattle. Patches of darkness had swallowed cities a world away. Embers glowed on the horizon, fires started by ruptured gas lines consumed blocks. Birdsong had died with the electricity; now he could hear animals stirring in distant forests like shattered kings freed from cages.
Angel's father grabbed his shoulder. "We have to leave, now," he said quietly. Their suburbs had not yet fallen prey to bandit gangs, but it was a matter of days. Supplies would dwindle, and desperate people would do desperate things.
They spent an hour loading canvas sacks with cans and dried food, pocketing a handful of bullets, and convincing a small horde of terrified neighbors to flee north with them. Angel led quietly, in the center of the group: a silent figure with luminous eyes scanning the ruins of his own street for threats. The neighbors were older, slower; they tripped and groaned under sacks of food. He told them to hurry, or they'd be sitting ducks when night came again.
Moving through the deserted city was surreal. The familiar brightness of billboards was extinguished, leaving behind statues and glass. Cars, left running, burned in waves of flame along empty highways. Angel moved like a ghost among the ruins: streetlights dark, electrical hum forever gone. Occasionally they heard shouts or gunfire echoing. The scent of smoke and fear hung in the air as they navigated gridlocked traffic and shattered silence.
They followed broken highways north. The Romanovs fell in step with two young brothers, Dmitri and Mikhail, hauling their own meager supplies on a battered bicycle. The boys watched Angel with awe and suspicion, their faces pale as the moon, eyes hollow. In the distance, a radio tower exploded like a firework as it collapsed. Maybe one of the promised rescue radios had just tried and failed to signal.
By afternoon, a loose camp had formed at a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Dogs howled in the fields. No one had spoken much; words felt worthless. In this quiet, Angel finally discovered something: he was, oddly, good at this. Not like the world before, where he was one adolescent among thousands. Here, he stood out. People noticed his calm, how he took charge without blinking an eye. He killed flies with flicks of his rifle and provided a strange comfort to the fearful.
He taught the survivors how to fish from a broken creek with torn pant legs, and how to dig a crude latrine to keep disease away. When they set traps, it was Angel who calibrated them with barbed wire from old fences, because nothing was too dangerous if he handled the blade. "Stick close," he told the brothers one evening, a broken flashlight in hand. The lantern was dead, but he traced on the ground a map by flashlight's faint glare. "We move at first light, a hundred yards east. Hide in the creek bed until I signal."
By dinner, the camp had a brittle order. Angel sat around the dying campfire, its heat little more than a memory. The small group looked to him. He realized, with a thrill, that he now needed to lead. Not a suggestion. His father, exhausted and grim, nodded at him.
Angel had become more than boy or man; in this black new world, he felt the first stirrings of real power in his veins.