‘War paint,’ says Dee, fastening his seatbelt.

‘Except it’s in our hair instead of on our faces,’ says Dum, starting the engine. ‘Because we’re original like that.’

‘Besides, are poisonous frogs worried about being spotted by birds?’ asks Dee. ‘Are poisonous snakes? They all have bright markings.’

‘You’re a poisonous frog now?’ I ask.

‘Ribbit.’ He turns and flicks out his tongue at me. It’s blue.

My eyes widen. ‘You dyed your tongue too?’

Dee smiles. ‘Nah. It’s just Gatorade.’ He lifts up a bottle half-full of blue liquid. ‘Gotcha.’ He winks.

‘“Hydrate or Die,” man,’ says Dum as we turn onto El Camino Real.

‘That’s not Gatorade’s marketing,’ says Dee. ‘It’s for some other brand.’

‘Never thought I’d say this,’ says Dum, ‘but I actually miss ads. You know, like “Just Do It.” I never realized how much of life’s good advice came from ads. What we really need now is for some industrious soul to put out a product and give us a really excellent saying to go with it. Like “Kill ’Em All and Let God Sort ’Em Out.”’

‘That’s not an advertising jingle,’ I say.

‘Only because it wasn’t good advice back in the day,’ says Dum. ‘Might be good advice now. Attach a product to it, and we could get rich.’ He turns and arches a brow at his brother, who turns and arches an identical eyebrow back.

‘So does anyone have a good survival strategy, or is there no hope for getting out of this nightmare?’ asks the Colonel.

‘We came up with a big, fat zero. I don’t know how we’re going to survive the blood hunt,’ says Dee.

‘That wasn’t the nightmare I was referring to,’ says the Colonel. ‘Death by stupid comments is what I was talking about.’

The twins look at each other and make an O with their mouths like little boys telling each other they’ve been busted.

I grin in spite of it all. It’s good to know I can still smile, if only a little.

Then we get down to business.

‘What’s going on with that angel plague you were working on, Doc? Any chance we could go pandemic on their asses?’ asks Dee.

He shakes his head. ‘It’ll take at least a year, assuming that we could get it to work. We don’t know anything about their physiology and don’t have anyone to test it on. But if we’re lucky, it’ll take a few of them out soon anyway.’

‘How?’ asks the Colonel.

‘The angels were creating another beast for the apocalypse,’ says Doc. ‘The instructions were very specific. It had to have seven heads that were a mix of animals.’

‘The sixer?’ I ask. ‘Yeah, I saw it.’

‘If it has seven heads, why do you call it a sixer?’ asks Sanjay.

‘It has the number six-six-six tattooed on its foreheads.’

Dum looks at me with a horrified expression.

‘The angels called it the beast,’ says Doc. ‘But I like your sixers name better.’

‘The seventh head was human, and it was dead,’ I say.

‘Was the sixer alive?’ asks Doc. ‘Did any of the angels around it look sick?’

‘Oh, it was definitely alive. I didn’t notice anybody looking sick. But then again, I wasn’t looking at them. Why?’

‘We had three of them.’

‘There are three of those things?’

‘All variations of each other. With that many animals mixed together in one body, things are bound to go wrong. At the same time they were making them, Laylah, the lead physician, was working on an apocalyptic plague. It was supposed to be for us humans, but there was a lot of experimentation to make it as gruesome as possible. Somehow, one of the strains got passed on to the sixers.’

I remember Uriel talking to Laylah in his suite before the last aerie party. He was pressuring her pretty hard to cut corners and make the apocalypse happen faster. I’m guessing she’s been cutting corners all along to meet his demands.

‘The sixers infected the angel doctors. They got sick, then about a day or two later, they were exposed to the sixers again, and that massively accelerated the disease. They bled out in the most horrible way. It looked excruciatingly painful too. It was everything they were trying to do with a human disease, only it killed angels and locusts instead. The human lab workers were fine, and so were the sixers. They were just carriers of the disease.’

‘Do you have one in a cage somewhere?’ I ask.

‘The infected sixers were all killed. I was ordered to dispose of the bodies. Angels don’t do dirty work like that. Before I burned them, though, I managed to sneak two vials of their blood. I used one to infect the new batch of sixers that they created. I was hoping it might cause some random damage.’

‘Did it?’ I ask, thinking about Raffe even now.

‘I don’t know. After the accident, they separated the projects to avoid further contamination, so I lost track of it.’

‘What did you do with the second vial of blood?’

‘I kept it for study. That’s what we’ve been using to try to come up with an angel plague.’

‘But no luck?’ I ask.

‘Not yet,’ says Doc. ‘Not for a long time to come.’

‘Time we don’t have,’ says the Colonel. ‘Next idea.’

Our goal is easy to identify – we need to come up with a way to survive the onslaught tonight. But we just talk in circles, trying to figure out how to do it. For all we know, we could be the only freedom fighters showing up at the Bay Bridge.

As we drive up the peninsula, we talk.

And talk.

And talk some more.

I’m trying not to yawn, but it’s not easy. It feels like it’s been a week since I slept.

‘The angels might not even know which bridge is the East Bay Bridge,’ says the Colonel. ‘We need a lure or something that will attract them away from the Golden Gate.’

‘What kind of a lure?’ asks Dee.

‘Should we dangle little babies from the bridge?’ asks Dum.

‘Sadly, that’s not funny,’ says Doc.

I rub my forehead. I’m usually not prone to headaches, but all this desperate talk of coming up with a plan is killing me. I’m not really the planning type.

My eyes drift to the window, and I become mesmerized by the drone of the adult voices in the car and my own sleepiness.