Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 3

  When she’s finished with her shower, she steps out and towels off, then dries her hair, forming it into a sturdy, dark ponytail. She applies light makeup, then returns to the bedroom to dress quietly in jeans and a white blouse. She opens the bedroom door and sees Nicole sprawled out on the futon, only barely covered. She tiptoes over and covers her fully with the light sheet, planting a kiss on her forehead. Nicole murmurs in half-sleep, twists a little under the sheet, and descends into sleep again.

  Felicia smiles.

  In the small kitchen, she wrangles with the door of the old fridge and finally extracts the green smoothie she made for herself the night before. Time to start making up for that evening of debauchery. She shakes it up, then downs it quickly, nods, and washes her glass.

  After brushing her teeth, she grabs her keys off the hallway table and opens the front door.

  “See ya later,” comes a sleepy farewell.

  “Kisses,” Felicia says, and closes and locks the door.

  In the parking lot, Felicia ducks into her car and sits there for a moment. She blinks. Her ears pop, and she moves her jaw around. What is that? There’s something in the air, but what is it? Some kind of uneasiness … some kind of throb, almost like a distant helicopter.

  She starts up the motor and pulls out. Motoring through the brightening but mostly empty streets east, she takes the turns in a weird funk. Something isn’t right.

  Her eyes flick upward, and she notices some kind of strange cloud up there. She knows it must simply be dawn coloring the atmosphere, but it looks very odd—a dark crimson haze, unsettled, stormy. It’s even darker in the rearview mirror, over the foothills. She tries to crane her head to peer back at it but can’t get a good view through her rear window.

  “What in the world …?” she whispers.

  The streets are quiet, as usual for a very early Saturday morning. It’s not even 6 a.m. yet. But there’s more to this feeling than the yawning drowsiness typical of her drive in to work. There’s still that uneasiness. She feels her pulse throbbing in her neck.

  As she waits to make the turn onto College, she watches a silver Acura make its way south. The driver, a 40s-ish man, is peering west, beyond her, at the sky. His look of edgy curiosity mirrors her own. Just as he passes out of sight, she half-recognizes him. What’s his name? He’s a customer, isn’t he? Maybe. She’s tempted to try a wave, but he’s preoccupied.

  When she makes her turn north, she watches him in her rearview mirror as he drives south. Yeah, he’s a customer. She should know his name.

  Felicia, not immodestly, attributes her success at the store with the casual friendships she can spark up during her transactions. It’s a part of her personality, which gives her a leg up on most of her coworkers. She’s easy with the customers and finds it personally rewarding to engage with them and learn a little about their lives. She’s good at it. That’s what separates her from someone like Janet—who has to work much harder at customer service, and it never feels quite genuine—and it’s what’s going to help Felicia ultimately realize her goal. That’s what her teachers tell her, and she feels it inside, like instinct.

  She has such a strong connection already with the community here. It’s that connection that has made her feel as if she might make a go of her own store in Fort Collins. Some day.

  But she should’ve remembered that man’s name.

  His daughter, too.

  In moments, she’s on Mountain and turning in to the tiny employee parking lot behind the store. The sour stink of piss drifts through her car vents, a reminder that the assholes and bums of Old Town nightlife will use any recessed space to find bladder relief. She almost considers it a weakness that the smell disgusts her, but she feels contempt for people who have no value for property and community. She herself has tried pressure-washing the concrete out here, but the smell is too baked in—the result of a hundred years of drunkards’ bloated bladders—and there are always new alcoholics. Alcoholics who are perhaps also customers.

  The rear delivery door is already open, and Janet’s old-lady bicycle is locked up by the trash bin. The woman is devoted to her work, that’s for sure.

  Felicia locks up her car and makes her way into the store. Janet already has the industrial fan positioned at the rear door, blowing through the store, filling it with as much cool air as possible this morning, in anticipation of another very warm Colorado day. Unlike Felicia’s apartment, the Food Co-Op boasts central air, but it’s weak as hell—and expensive.

  “Good morning!” Felicia calls over the din. She grabs her green vest off its hallway hook and shrugs it on.

  Janet is fastidiously refreshing the bulk items near the back of the store. “Hey you!” she calls. She holds a big plastic bag of peanuts with something like distaste, scooping into the bin. Felicia knows this is Janet’s least favorite task in the store.

  “Want me to take care of that?”

  “No, I’ve got it. I need you to look over the schedule. I can’t abide it anymore. Trish dropped that bomb the other day, and I can’t get my head around it. Give it 15 minutes, see what you can do.”

  Scheduling is a newly delegated task for Felicia, and she has embraced it as one more tiny step toward her business goal.

  “I’m on it.” She yawns. “How was yesterday?”

  Janet isn’t the greatest casual conversationalist, not the sharing type, but Felicia always likes to try.

  “Oh, fine. Not crazy busy, but steady. Did you have a nice day off?”

  Felicia smiles privately. “Wonderful.”

  Pleasantries over, Felicia enters the tiny office, storing her belongings in her cubby. The office door clicks shut, and she’s alone. She gives the desk a hard look, sighs, then settles herself into her task. The schedule is already spread out on the metal surface. It’s a chaos of scribbles and cross-outs and highlights—not to mention Post-It notes containing all the idiosyncratic time-off requests from the rest of the small staff. She’s tempted to start over with a clean sheet, but she decides to at least get a grasp of it before starting over. She takes up her favorite mechanical pencil and begins.

  Two minutes and seventeen seconds later, something happens inside her head.

  It’s a red yank, a twist of gray matter like a fleshy hook digging in and grabbing hold. She feels her head jerk. Her consciousness blinks out for a moment, then returns.

  “Whoa, whoa,” she whispers, dropping the pencil and grabbing the edge of the desk.

  She focuses on the schedule’s scrawls, blinks hard.

  What was that? What the hell was that?

  Her first thought is aneurysm. In a worried flurry, she recalls some long-ago newspaper article about some perfectly healthy student in Texas falling over dead from a spewing artery deep in his gray matter. A pulse of adrenaline courses through her, liquid lightning.

  Then she recalls her nightmare, more vividly than ever, the grasping red fingers, the slithering grab. She swallows heavily. Whatever happened just now is the same thing. It’s connected.

  It’s the same thing.

  She’s shaking. Whatever is inside her is still there. Something is inside her. She feels a pressure building.

  “Janet?” Her voice is full of tremors.

  In response, her boss warbles an incomprehensible, almost guttural sound, and Felicia hears the unmistakable sound of Janet slumping to the floor and the big bag of unsalted peanuts spilling out over the laminate floor.

  It is the last thing Felicia hears before her mind goes red.

  CHAPTER 4

  Felicia’s consciousness shrinks to a tiny crimson dot.

  She is crammed down beneath something—something!—and she can’t move at all. It’s something heavy. So heavy. She can’t feel anything. She has a dim awareness of her body, her limbs, but they’re not responding. They seem ridiculously far away, the foggy distance like something in a surreal dream. She feels an impulse to scream, but instead she experiences something like suffocation. Anxiety builds like
pressure against her chest.

  What happened?!

  She comes to a slow realization that she’s not even seeing out of her eyes. There’s light, but it’s a red, splotchy glow, like the sun behind closed eyelids. She feels a disembodied panic. Then she feels what little consciousness she has slipping away toward a black void, and fear spikes somewhere. Everywhere. And then …

  Black.

  After an eternity, the crimson light flickers.

  She’s sluggish in her awareness, as if waking from a long sleep. A coma, perhaps.

  How long has she been unconscious?

  She can hardly think. She feels an almost utterly draining weakness. She tries to focus—and can’t. What was she doing just now? Where was she? Why can’t she remember what she was just doing?

  That panic again.

  Wait. Wait.

  She can’t remember anything.

  Who was she with? Just now, who was she with? When she tries to concentrate, the effort drifts away from her. Janet. The thought comes to her like the touch of a dark mist.

  There’s a surge of recollection for home—the lumpy softness of her bed, her tiled shower, her refrigerator with the frost-ridden freezer, the blue futon, the television set, Nicole cocking her pretty head in mirth—and she reaches for all of it, but it fragments and breaks apart like crumbling soil.

  I have to wake up!

  Everything is sluggish. Something is crushing her. She feels not the weight of it but rather its personality, its color. Red. As if she is on the verge of drowning under a lake of blood. But the lake is a living thing, the blood pulsing under its own influence.

  She realizes that the lake of blood is her own body, and she is no longer in control of it.

  Is she paralyzed?

  I can’t move.

  She doesn’t even feel as if she can see out of her own eyes. There’s something there, though, some kind of awareness of light. She can’t move her eyes! She can vaguely see something in her peripheral vision: cabinets, a pegboard covered with papers, shelves of manuals, a computer, a rolling chair.

  She was sitting on that chair when this happened.

  Wasn’t she?

  Something is forcing her consciousness away from recollection. Steering it toward something new. Felicia tries to resist the pull, but she can’t.

  Something is inside her. Inside her head. She feels it like pressure, and now the feeling is like drifting to sleep, with a dense weight on top of all of her. Drifting into unconsciousness but retaining awareness, as if in a waking dream.

  Is this the nightmare? This drifting red fog?

  Her skull is alive with murmurings, with red whispers. There’s nothing else. Was there ever anything else? She doesn’t understand the whispers. They’re slippery and weird. They slide through her, around her, grabbing, relinquishing, trying again. Seeking something.

  There’s only the need.

  The need.

  The pull of this new consciousness is irresistible. She has no choice but to heed it. It’s utterly focused. On the objective. The objective is everywhere, it is close, and she must go to it. Physically go to it. She can’t put it into words, she can’t name it, but she can see it huge in her mind’s eye. It is verdant in her awareness, lush and green, and she feels as if she can lose herself in it if she can only go out and find it.

  And there’s something else. She knows that once she finds this thing, and simply lets go of her consciousness as Felicia Stone, she will know a new luxurious awareness as one with this fertile garden.

  Is this what heaven is? Has she died? She feels a burst of anxiety at the notion. Has she really died and gone to heaven? If she were to simply let go, would she fall into paradise? Just like in the Bible?

  No, that’s not it. Not with this pressing need, not with this nervous and desperate compulsion. Some dim part of her feels it like a sexual need—a lust. Something she needs to take care of now.

  But she can’t move. She still can’t move at all.

  And this need, this compulsion, it’s not coming from her. It’s coming from something else. This new awareness. It’s not her at all. But it’s something inside her. She sees dim shapes in her vision, large things looming, and she knows that this … something else, something larger than her … is also seeing these shapes. It has muscled its way into her vision, using her immobile eyes to see what it needs to see.

  What it needs.

  Vaguely, something in her innards clenches.

  She feels infinitesimal.

  Deep inside herself, Felicia forces herself calm.

  What can she see? With her limited peripheral vision, what can she see?

  The chair, mountainous above her. The dingy expanse of the ceiling. She’s on the floor, staring up. Her vision lacks any kind of clarity, so everything is mired in a thick haze. Fluorescent light buzzes up there somewhere. Recognizing these things, she realizes that her eyes aren’t even blinking reflexively. They should be burning from lack of moisture, but she can’t feel them.

  Everything is so far away! Hopelessly removed, impossible to reach.

  Where is she again?

  The word store comes to her, but nothing else. There are memories surrounding that word, but they’re blurry and dark.

  Felicia becomes gradually aware of another presence in the store, and it is like her—it is undergoing the same transformation, the same ordeal. She can see it in her periphery like something glowing. An energy flows from it, reaching out to her, just as her own energy reaches out to it.

  It’s a person.

  She remembers … what? Someone falling, someone she knows. She doesn’t remember falling herself, but she remembers the other person falling.

  She senses some kind of whisper—no, not a whisper, but a sound inside like a voice, or is it an image? Her senses seem to overlap.

  The door. She has to get beyond it. She has to get out.

  Something inside her is pulsing, and it’s not her heartbeat. Something urgent behind her deadened eyes. The need for the objective is focused there, like something magnetized. Like a black hole, it seems to be pulling at her, and if she let it, it would swallow her.

  Everything is an obstacle. These eyes, this body, these mountainous objects in her peripheral vision, this closed room.

  She tries sending signals out to her extremities, tries moving a finger or a toe, tries moving her lip and of course shifting her eyes—nothing.

  Exhausted, she gives up the effort. She drifts into the background. She feels like nothingness. She experiences the equivalent of her eyes rolling back, but some part of her snaps back to alertness. She’s frightened of oblivion. Because she senses that’s what awaits her.

  Do her ears work? What is she hearing?

  Some kind of oppressive humming. A broken droning noise, as if her eardrums have blown out and all she can hear is a hard, monotonous vibration. It’s the soundtrack of need.

  There’s something else. Images coming not from her eyes but from the overriding consciousness. Images of crimson and lava. Sweltering desert. No moisture. Dry fire. These images lurk like memory, an undercurrent, almost comforting.

  But now, atop these static images, are moving things, organic things, all angles like elbows, clacking and twitching. The small consciousness that is Felicia rears back at these images, unnerved.

  Everything is chaos in her mind and body, and she can only wait it out.

  What seems like hours later, she feels herself waking. Not from slumber but into awareness. With a jolt, she realizes that she could have drifted away into nothingness, into the black hole in the center of her head, and she would have simply been … gone.

  The muscle beneath her eye is twitching.

  She can feel it happening, knows it’s her head, her body, but she also feels a disconnect. Because she’s not the one making it happen. And it’s more than involuntary. She’s staring up at a small cone of red light, and the sensation at her eye is there, but far removed.

  Why wo
n’t this body work?

  That thought blasts through her—or what’s left of her—and she’s unsure whether it’s her own thought or someone else’s.

  That eye, though, that muscle … she tries to push her awareness up toward that small crimson hole, which she now equates with her consciousness, with her waking life.

  She strains toward the eye. Her eye. Keeps straining.

  Another twitch.

  And another.

  It’s happening rhythmically.

  She encourages the movement, tries to build strength, to regain sensation. To somehow emerge into consciousness. Real consciousness.

  She pushes hard, as hard as she is able.

  The muscle keeps twitching.

  A little more. A little more.

  Long minutes later, a muscle at the edge of her mouth moves a millimeter.

  A tiny, almost lost part of her experiences a distant thrill.

  But she’s so sleepy. She’s exhausted. She wants to give up. She wants to drift out.

  No!

  She pushes at the twitch, encourages it, as best she can. Urges it to move again.

  And it does.

  She pushes again. Hard.

  It moves.

  She’s doing this.

  Right?

  Either way, it doesn’t matter. She pushes and pushes. Stares way up at that tiny red dot. Too far up there. She has to get back there.

  Perhaps an hour later, her nostrils flare, and her energies are renewed.

  It’s already the most difficult thing she’s ever done—moving a few inconsequential facial muscles. She wants to weep but can’t. She wants to flail her arms and bang her head in frustration, but she can’t even sense that her limbs are there, let alone feel an inkling of how to control them. She doesn’t even know the ghost of a phantom limb. There’s nothing except the reaching sensation of those tiny muscles on her face.

  In her drifting mind, she equates these little muscles with fingers on a ledge. She sees dream imagery of her own fingers, stretched to impossible lengths, their tips barely grasping the tiniest fraction of the ledge while the rest of her dangles over a sucking pit. That ledge is her life. The tips of her fingers keep wrestling for better grip, keep trying to gain further purchase.