Coping by J Bennett

Chapter 1
    “Step one…” Gabe leans the shovel
against his body, spits into his hands and rubs them together vigorously. “Less
friction. Come on, try it.”
    “Ew, no,” I say.
    Gabe frowns. “And I suppose you’ve
done this before. You know everything about it.”
    “I’m wearing gloves, I don’t need
to spit.” I hold up my hands to show off the black fingerless gloves that are a
necessary fashion accessory.
    “Oh yeah.” Gabe grins at me, and
despite the circumstances, I see playful hues of green edging the glow around
his body.
    “Get going,” Tarren calls behind
us. His long body is stretched out on the roof of his silver Murano SUV. He’s
propped up on his elbows, peering back toward the road through a pair of
binoculars and listening to the police scanner next to him.
    “No one’s going to see us,” Gabe
responds to Tarren. “We’re in Fucksville, Michigan, population no one. They’ve
got more out-of-business mattress stores than people.”
    “And one less angel,” I murmur. I
try not to be nervous about this; try not to think about the shovels and the
thing the shovels are meant to do. But a small, desperate voice in my head
keeps whispering, this is not my life, this is not
my life .
    It is
now , I think back…at myself…because I’m not crazy or anything.
    “Right,” Gabe grins like I just said
something funny. A heavy wind kicks up. There’s nothing in this endless stretch
of flat land to stop it, and it hits us hard, tossing around my short hair and
rippling Gabe’s blood-stained t-shirt.
    I smell the blood, the sweat
trickling down Gabe’s face, the car exhaust from the distant road, the rich
scent of earth kicking up in the wind…so many smells.
    “So, we’re going for a six by four
rectangle,” Gabe continues. “The key is to start on the outside, get in deep
with the shovel and try to take off the top layer in as few pieces as we can.
We want to keep the grass as intact as possible so when we’re done it doesn’t
look like much of a disturbance.”
    Gabe plunges his shovel into the
dirt. It goes three quarters in. My brother’s face turns sour. Actually,
half-brother if we’re being technical.
    “Thick as clay. This is going to
suck royally,” he says. “Texas is my favorite. Lots of empty space and loose
dirt, but not too sandy. Best burying ground for my money.”
    He steps on the crest of the metal,
pressing his thin body onto the shovel to force it deeper into the ground. I
follow his lead. My first strike with the shovel is a timid one. It only nudges
halfway into the ground. When I step on my shovel, it doesn’t sink at all. I
bend my knees and hop a little, and the shovel pushes about an inch deeper into
the stubborn clay.
    Gabe laughs. “This does not bode
well for your grave digging future.” His aura pulses deep sapphire blues and
those amused strands of emerald.
    “Shut up.”  I pull the shovel out,
tighten my grip and plunge it all the way into the ground in a single stroke. I
pull up a thick wad of soil with slender roots hanging out over the sides.
    “Well, yeah, I guess the super
strength will pretty much compensate for poor fundamentals,” Gabe shrugs.
    “I don’t have super strength,” I
mutter. “I can’t like, lift a car or anything.”
    “Really?” Gabe dumps a shovelful of
soil next to mine. “Have you tried to?”
    “No.”
    “Then maybe you can.”
    I open my mouth to respond, but the
truth is, I honestly don’t know if I can lift a car. In those first weeks after
the change, Tarren tried to test the limits of my new abilities. I always held
back. Part of it was fear of what my new body could do. A bigger part was about
hiding my secret. It takes three injections of an angel’s bone marrow to turn a
human completely into an angel. Tarren and Gabe think I only got one injection.
I need them to keep on believing that. If Tarren discovered that I’d had two
injections and was even more of a genetically-enhanced