“Ty.”
The venom laced into that single syllable made dread bloom in his stomach like some undead flower.  The murky blackness of the alley before him and the harsh cold of the New York night didn’t help matters; he felt like he was about to be swallowed up in the the throat of some horrific monster.  He didn’t turn. 
“What do you want?”
“Do you have them?” the older boy asked. 
Tyler did turn then, pretending to search his pockets, but knowing they were all gone.  He’d spent the day at school and at work knowing they were all gone. 
“Man,” he said dully.  “Must have left ’em somewhere.” 
The dread boiled fearfully as the older boy gave a shout of frustration.
“I need those bullets, Tyler!”
Tyler couldn’t respond; he merely shrugged and turned to go. 
Before he could walk two feet, however, the older boy was upon him.  He lifted Tyler easily by the shoulders and hurled him into the darkness of the alley, where he fell onto his back.  He scrambled to get to his feet, but the older boy shoved him down again, pinning him to the icy concrete. 
“If you don’t tell me where those bullets are, I’ll kill you with the empty gun.  I’ll bash it into your skull over and over until you’re brain-dead.  Tell me what you did with them!”
Tyler couldn’t breathe. 

“You really thought—I was actually—gonna help you—shoot up the school?”

The older boy froze. 

“Who did you tell, kid?”

“Who do you—who do you think I told—moron?”

“What did you do with the bullets?”

“I ate ’em—they were good, too.”

The older boy pulled the empty pistol from his jacket pocket, where Ty knew it had been sitting, waiting, for over a month now, not aiming it anywhere in particular. 
“I’ll do it, Tyler, I mean it.  This is your last chance.  What did you do with the bullets?”
The dread had turned to full-fledged fear as soon as he’s been thrown into the alleyway, and then dissipated a little—the old man had to be coming along any time now—but seeing the gun in the older boy’s hand, even if it was empty, brought the fear back and boiled it up into panic.  He could already feel the metal slamming into his brain, grinding into his skull, over and over and over again, until the pain and the panic turned numb and there was only a placid anguish.  Imaginary agony burned his head. 
He gasped for air and stammered, trying to buy time. 
“I—I put them in—I’ll go and get—I promise—”
“You’ll go where, Tyler?” the older boy asked with a slightly fanatical smirk.
All of a sudden, a light flared behind the older boy’s back.  A white light, brighter than a car’s headlights.  It had to be the old man.  The bullets had been handed over to him hours ago.  Tyler stopped trying to talk and just waited, still gasping for air. 
The older boy shook Tyler’s shoulder impatiently.  
“Is that your final answer?  I don’t think I could quite make that out, Tyler.  What, did you hide them under your bed or something?”
The white light vanished.
Before Tyler could take another breath, a dozen small hands appeared in sync out of the blackness, seizing the older boy by the arms and torso and ripping him away from Tyler.  

Tyler lay there a split second, confused, and then got to his feet, shaking.  Then he fell to his knees again.  The sight before him was too strange for him to handle just then.
Five or six little girls, all dressed in identical, simple white clothes, were pulling the struggling older boy away, into the dim orange light just outside the alleyway.  On the sidewalk they paused, and two of them put their hands on his head.  He slumped over instantly, and the girls lifted his huge self and sat him gently against the brick wall of the building on the left. 
“Hi, Tyler!”
He jumped a foot to the right, trying to stand again and slipping in the process. 

Another little girl in white—this one with short blonde hair and bright blue eyes—had been standing right next to him. 
She smiled as the others joined her. 

“What’s the matter, Ty?  Don’t you remember me?”
Tyler stared.
The little girl giggled.  “That’s all right.  You’ll remember me eventually.”
Tyler tried to regain his composure. 

“What’s going on?” he rasped.  “Who are you kids?”
The girl continued to beam at him.  The others grinned, too.  None of them could have been over eight. 
“You’ll remember me eventually,” the blonde one repeated.  “’Cause you know me.  But I can’t tell you their names.  You never met them.  It’s, like, a thing.  Sorry.”
“Where did you come from?”
“We came from heaven,” said a girl with long dark hair seriously.  The others nodded.
Tyler scoffed.  Heaven?  Seriously?  Well, they’re little kids, how do you expect their cover story to sound… 
“What are you guys supposed to be, angels?”
At this they all laughed. 
“No, silly!” said a black girl with pigtails.  “People don’t become angels; the angels were already there.”
“We just like to visit,” said a redhead with freckles. 
“And we saw you needed help,” said another blonde.
“And you were always so nice to me,” said the first blonde.
“So we made the dude fall asleep.”
“And when he wakes up he won’t remember us.”
“Prob’ly.”
“But if he does—”
“No one will believe that he was beat up by a bunch of little girls!”
They all burst into giggles again. 
Tyler listened in a blank sort of disbelief.  I’m hallucinating, he thought, from the lack of oxygen.  That’s what this is.  Or maybe my skull has caved in and I’m just doing some wishful thinking thing or…
The one with short blonde hair blinked, and a weird look came over her face.  She glanced up at Tyler, and he lost his breath as he realized that he did know that small pale face.  You?  How?
“We have to go now, Tyler,” she said.  “I would go home and go to sleep if I were you.  Good night!”

Tyler laughed a little.  "Yeah, back to Heaven, right?"
With that, the silent white light came back, blooming like a vivid flower of hope rather than a rotten flower of dread, and with it a soft breeze and a soothing warmth.  Tyler stared into it.  He hadn't paid attention to it before.  He thought he could make out images in it, trees and faces and birds and bridges, but they slipped away when he tried to focus on them.  The girls stepped into it one by one, except for the one with short blonde hair, who gazed solemnly at Tyler for a minute.
“You still don’t remember me, Ty?  We were really good friends…”
Tyler reached out and pulled the little girl into a hug.  “I do remember you, actually.  Sorry it took me so long.”
Her face lit up.  “Thank goodness!  I was worried for a minute there.”
She stepped towards the light, still watching him.  “Bye, Tyler!  Thank you for helping me!”
Then she was gone, and for a mournful second, as Ty gazed into it, he wanted to step into the glorious light, too.  It radiated an elegant, calm embrace; it promised a timeless peace, eternal tranquility, quiet happiness.  Could it really be Heaven?  Did Tyler even believe in that kind of thing? 

He reached for it—

—but it vanished. 

He dropped his arm and stood there dumbly, hoping against hope for it to come back. 
He thought about the girl.  How could he have forgotten what she looked like?  It had only been a few years. 

She was the skinny little kid from upstairs, one floor above his mom’s apartment.  The one who always smelled terrible, the one whose hair was always a tangled mess, who was always hungry, who always flinched when anyone came too close to her or raised a hand, who never cried. 
Tyler had been coming down from his friend’s apartment one night—Isaac who lived on the top floor—taking the stairs because there was no elevator, and he’d almost tripped over her.  She was asleep outside her apartment door, bundled up in her hoodie.
Uncertain, Tyler bent down and shook her awake—he couldn’t just leave her there.  She opened her eyes blearily,  and shuffled further into the wall. 
“What d’you want?”
“What are you doing out here?  Why are you sleeping outside, kid?”
She rubbed at her eye with a grimy hand.  “It doesn’t matter.  Just leave me alone.”  She rolled over to face the wall. 
“I can’t just leave you out here.  It’s freezing.  Isn’t anyone looking for you?  Your mom, or…?”
“He told me if I was home after dark one more time he would lock me out.  It’s only fair.  I should have listened.”
“Who’s ‘he’?”
“My mom’s boyfriend.”
Tyler sat there, at a loss for what to do. 
After a minute, she glanced back.  “What are you still doing here?  You’re being creepy.  Go away.”
Tyler shook his head.  “Sorry.  Look, I can’t leave you out here.  Do you want me to call someone?”
She sat up and shrugged.  “No one to call.”  She rubbed her eyes again.  “Can I just crash at your place?”
It was weird to hear a five-year-old girl say that.  He wondered if she’d heard her mom say it, and if so, how many times.
“I…I guess so…”
“Cool, thanks.”
She got to her feet to follow him, and he wondered what his mom would think.  He felt like it would be awfully strange to see your son of eleven ask if a little girl of five could sleep on their couch. 
His mom was working late, though, and never noticed her, for it was dark when she came home, and she passed right by the living room on the way to her bedroom.  She got home late and left early, and she never had time in the morning to enter the living room, either.  She left on business a lot, too. 
So over the next two years, the girl sometimes hung out at his apartment, often sleeping on the couch when his mom wasn’t home, sometimes eating dinner with both of them on the nights when Mom was home.  Mom had always been willing to let other kids into her home, though Tyler wasn’t sure how she would have reacted had she known that the little girl sometimes slept in their living room without her knowledge.  Tyler never met the girl’s mother; according to the girl, her stepdad hardly ever let her leave the apartment. 
They played video games.  They watched cartoons.  They told each other bad jokes.  It was like having a part-time little sister.  A part-time little sister who would randomly show up with black eyes or bruises or terrible gashes, who would silently slip into the bathroom and sit there a while. 
And then, one perfectly normal day, Tyler had come home to ambulances and police, and he vaguely heard a story about a little girl beaten to death by her mother’s boyfriend the night before.  The man, heavily hungover and about to pass out, left the place in the back of one of the cop cars.
And then, a not-so-perfectly-normal week later, the ambulances were there again.  A suicide this time.  A lady who never left the place. 
And now the apartment above Tyler was empty.

He kept looking at the place where the light had been, right there before the unconcerned brick wall.  It didn’t come back.  The old man showed up eventually, but Ty shrank back into the shadows, and the old man merely shook the other boy awake and roughly pushed him into the back of his car while the boy mumbled something about “angels, Grandpa”. 
Ty turned back to the wall.
“Bye, Sarah,” he said aloud, strange in the silence.
And then, not knowing what else to do, Tyler climbed the stairs and went home.