Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 4

  Door.

  Right, the door.

  The door she needs to get through, in order to reach the objective.

  But her vision seems darker. More indistinct.

  How long has she been like this? Is it night?

  … help …

  The word floats through her, at the edge of her cognizance, but she doesn’t know how to process it.

  She keeps pushing.

  There’s a moment, after interminable hours—or minutes, how can she tell?—when she feels several muscles around her eyes moving in concert, in the perfect sequence, and abruptly her eyes swivel to the right.

  As a pulse of excitement ripples through her consciousness, the other awareness inside her crowds in, a heavy weight inside her skull, overbearing. It whispers in images, urgent sights awaiting her. It’s like a language coming at her at machine-gun pace, battering her senses, but part of her understands it.

  Her eyes are anchored in place, staring flatly at the door now, and those muscles in her face are still twitching rhythmically, and that door is important. There’s the knob, she knows the knob, she knows she has to turn it to open the door.

  She tries straining her head, all the muscles in her head, toward the door. The effort drains her almost completely. She drifts back—

  No!

  —and surges upward again.

  Her eye swivels again, randomly, and her face feels alive with tics. She can feel them!

  She falls back, completely spent, drifting. She now has a sense of how far back she can drift without losing herself altogether—there’s a precipice from which she can’t let herself plummet. She’s empowered by this sensation of control, as small as it is. Like allowing herself to float on her back in water, utilizing the countless muscles along her trunk and limbs to maintain balance and barely remain buoyant.

  She feels herself come into awareness. Her eyes twitch once more, swivel drily—she can’t blink!—and stare toward the door. Everything remains blurry. Disembodied, she feels great concentration in the center of her skull, unprecedented focus, like tightness. Like pressure. An uncontainable need. It’s a pulse, a rush.

  Over it all, a great frustration vibrates.

  What is wrong with this body?! she screams, loud, inside, soundless.

  Nothing works.

  Why?

  There’s a whisper of a thought under that one, incomprehensible at first, then twisting into clarity.

  What went wrong?

  She doesn’t understand the meaning of the words, lets them scatter.

  Not-Felicia focuses all of her remaining energy on lifting her head. At first nothing happens, and then suddenly there’s a twitch. Her whole head shifts up, chin pointing at the ceiling, and then falls back to the hard floor. The movement is all of a few millimeters, and yet the sensation fills her tiny, exhausted soul with relief.

  Her head jerks again, rhythmic. She didn’t do that one. The movement is simply repeating, again as if involuntarily.

  She drifts back.

  She can barely think. Exhaustion has taken her to edge of nothingness. All her thoughts are tendrils leading into oblivion, and all of them are pulling at her, almost seductively. There’s a caress to the sensation, almost like—

  Her touch.

  Whose touch?

  I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

  The words dissolve.

  She wants to give herself over to the touch, to float away into bliss, but that’s not going to happen.

  It needs me.

  Another thought from out of nowhere. The words echo across a great expanse, come back at her as she settles back again, conserving energy. The energy at the center of her is pulsing outward now, its illumination crackling in all these new movements, and it scares her. It scares the tiny part of her that cowers beneath it.

  Her shoulder convulses.

  Instantly she’s back to awareness, trying to see out of cloudy, barely moving eyes.

  Both shoulders are moving, jerking backward for purchase on the floor. Her muscles won’t cooperate. She reaches back, muscle memory flashing.

  Images of desert. Hot, searing. Scrabbling. Swarming.

  Columns of clay twined into crumbling architecture, bustling with angular activity.

  But.

  Hunger.

  She’s screaming inside.

  She needs this to work. She needs this body to work. She must reach the objective. Which is beyond that door. She knows how exiting through that door will work. The key is the handle, and she knows she can turn it. She has studied it. But it’s all for naught if she can’t get this body to work.

  With each passing second, more muscles cooperate. She bends back, willing the limbs into full motion. She knows how to move them, how to use them to escape this room, but they won’t come fully under her control.

  She squeezes her shoulder blades back—the musculature is working!

  The motion repeats.

  She’s getting stronger.

  This rhythmic twitching, it makes sense now. The rhythm is at the center of everything, and it is working. It equals persistence, and it equals power. Control is returning to limbs and trunk. And yet as power over her body returns to her, there is a distant pain. It’s there, and it’s strong, but it’s also muted. Something is muting it, and so it doesn’t matter.

  How much time has passed? She has to get out of this room.

  That’s what matters.

  She lies there, on her back, her muscles clenching, surging.

  Getting stronger.

  Until she hears a clatter.

  She hears!

  She was so intent, focused on the center of her being, that she didn’t even notice her sense of sound returning. Her mouth opens in a crooked O of surprise, and her body goes still.

  Beyond the door—the door she must get past—something is making a shambling sound, of limbs and frustration. Is it the objective? No. She can visualize the objective in her mind’s eye, gigantic, luminous. Fecund, and healing, and glorious. It is something she must go to; it is not something that will come to her.

  What is this noise?

  It’s the other body, the glowing energy that is a part of her. And when she extends her awareness outward, she can sense others in the vicinity, and more in the broader area, and still more in an uncertain distance. She can feel them, and they are all a part of her.

  A web of souls.

  The whispers are everywhere, and she understands that her thoughts and her actions are in concert with all of them. She feels a powerful kinship with them, a shared purpose. She takes a silent, unmoving moment to acknowledge them. They’re in the neighboring businesses, in the street, in apartments all around.

  She feels immediate empathy with the closest body’s movement, and as if reflexively, her own body thrashes on the floor, the elbows knocking the tile, the shoulder blades banging, the heels flailing. From her mouth comes a raw gasp.

  The momentum of her strained thrashing lifts the body in a severe arc, and she feels—not so distantly now—the knuckles cracking against the floor, the fingers angling for purchase. Sensation is returning to this body exponentially now. She hears the other body thrashing as hers is.

  As she batters the body against two larger structures on the floor—the words chair and desk move through her compromised mind—she stares at the door. She can see through the eyes a little more clearly now, although they’re still difficult to control. She keeps blinking as if to clear the vision, but the cloudiness won’t go away. She can, however, see the door’s handle, above some kind of boxy item in the foreground. She locks her vision on that handle. The handle that leads to—

  The objective.

  She continues to gasp with effort. She can’t help it. The sound is like gravel from out of the dry throat. Her heels are thrashing against the desk now, and although not-Felicia distantly recognizes the jarring and repeated impact with the metal corners, it is immaterial. The bones and joints are sound.

 
Her arms slide back behind her, shoulder blades pinching, and she’s propped up off the ground, favoring her left shoulder. The consciousness inside her trills with jubilant energy. Not-Felicia feels it like contagious laughter, overlaid with a surging purpose. She can manipulate this body to her purpose.

  But why is this taking so long?

  She should be out of this place!

  As these thoughts pummel her consciousness, she hears further movement beyond the door—the other body moving now with full purpose. It moves directly to her door, and the glowing presence is vivid. Not-Felicia can sense its urge to help her, but the pull of the objective is too strong. She wants to call out to it, but nothing happens. Through blurred vision, she can see the shadow of its progress. It is moving toward the objective. Its mindscape is clear and clean, and it knows that it has a clear route.

  The sound—of limbs jerking, hands and feet grasping at the ground—fades to the left. She hears a laborious sound of metal on metal, a slide and shift, and understands that the body is manipulating another door. She imagines herself doing the same. She has that knowledge.

  After a length of time, she hears the front glass door open, and the body rushes out, toward—

  The body is gone, and its mindscape fades into the distance.

  The loss of contact sends her into a frenzy, kicking and flailing, and now she feels a full sense of control overtaking her. She rises to full bent-back height, stares through still-blurry eyes at the door. She knows how to manipulate that handle, but there’s something blocking the door. She can’t reach her hand over this obstacle and touch the handle. She shoves at the obstacle with her head, instinctively, and it rasps along the floor and lodges directly beneath the handle.

  She pauses and stares at the obstacle, and above it, the blocked handle. The predicament doesn’t make sense to her for a moment. She growls in her throat and glares, flexing her muscles rhythmically.

  Her inverted head pushes forward again, shoving at the obstacle. It won’t move.

  What is it?

  Human words whisper through her mind, but she can’t grasp them.

  Feeling a new confidence with her limbs, she heaves herself onto the obstacle itself—it’s a wobbly construction of metal and plastic, and for some reason its name won’t come to her. She balances her right shoulder on its black surface, and grasps the door handle firmly with her fingers. She twists the handle, but the metal of the obstacle prevents it from moving. A metal bar has lodged beneath the handle, preventing it from turning.

  She screeches a hoarse gasp.

  She stares.

  Frustration boils in her blood.

  She has knowledge inside her—not only about how to manipulate various types of door handles and how to identify most obstacles, but also a basic knowledge of the workings of this body. She knows how it has been bent to the will of her nature, and she knows how its life-giving functions have been altered to support the pursuit of the objective. She knows how the blood flows through its veins, and how its inefficient central circulatory muscle has been rendered dormant in favor of a more familiar mechanism. She has this knowledge, but she can operate the body only as far as it will allow.

  She is confounded by this obstacle.

  She ratchets her head on its neck, searching the darkness through the small, blurry eyes for another means of exit. There is none. No window, no other door.

  She balances atop the obstacle and throws her body at the door, to no avail. She tries repeatedly, not caring about the cosmetic integrity of the body’s epidermal layers.

  After a long period of time, it’s clear that the door will not be opened by force.

  Not-Felicia can only perch atop the obstacle, stewing, the muscles along her trunk and down her limbs clenching and unclenching in rhythm.

  Twelve hours later, she’s in the same position, staring at the door, hunger clawing at her insides, and all the other bodies in the vicinity have gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  Her new mind dreams of voices, of distant mindscapes, as the body remains idle, conserving energy. Her eyelids tremble under a constant onslaught of stimuli and the occasional blasted directive from the atmosphere. Her body feels the urgency to respond, and each time a new directive invades her skull, her muscles twitch, and her bones strain. She aches to escape and contribute; the compulsion is all-consuming.

  She has only the vaguest awareness of others in the vicinity now. There is one body to the southeast, a body that has achieved its objective on a singular target and is extracting the nutrient. In her mind, she can feel the relief, she can feel the rush vicariously. She is still part of the collective and understands the achievement. It’s happening.

  She waits.

  Then, as if from under water, not-Felicia hears a crash of broken glass. Her body convulses and lurches up, aware. Her ears are hyper-attuned.

  She feels as if she has been in stasis for days. The need is clawing at her now, fervent. A terrible thirst is consuming her. Her body is deteriorating, she knows. It is becoming weak. Soon it will fail because of its own limitations.

  There are voices, and in the very next room she senses the bright, glowing presences of two human beings. Living humans! How can that be? Not-Felicia stares motionless at the door, beyond which she can sense closer movement.

  “Go, go!”

  “Are we clear in here?”

  “No movement.”

  The words mean something to a tiny, hollow part of her, but they wisp away almost immediately under a general notion of threat.

  There are more words, murmurs, then a heavy sound in the distance.

  “Aw shit!” one of the voices cries.

  “Nothing … nothing. Wait, wait, here we go!”

  “What?!”

  “Something collapsed.”

  “I think it was the restaurant on the corner, where BeauJo’s used to be. That building. The FedEx plane might’ve clipped it. It’s probably been smoldering all this time.”

  “We gotta get out of here, right? Like, now?”

  “I still don’t see any bodies, let’s just get what we need.”

  The voices go indistinct.

  Not-Felicia stares at the door.

  What’s happening?

  The door handle jerks—right in front of not-Felicia’s inverted face. She tenses, ready to leap. In a sliver of a moment, she can see inside the mindscapes of both humans. It is not as clear a view as she has of those in the web of souls, but the minds are open to her nonetheless. One is a figure of authority, trying to wrestle some sense of control over the situation; he is a focused, powerful being and a direct threat, carrying a weapon. The other human is a father, and at this moment he has his offspring on his mind, as well as a number of other surviving humans holed up … somewhere.

  How have they survived?

  The door flies open, and the obstruction clatters away. Light floods into the room. She feels a sting in her eyes, and involuntarily her eyelids flutter.

  “Hey!”

  A human being is standing there—against all reason.

  It’s a strange bipedal creature, tall and pale, and not-Felicia feels a sharp twang of fear. It’s standing right in front of her, utterly weird. It’s the authority figure, and it is wearing some kind of gray cloth over its skin, and it is holding two loose, bulky containers, full of obscured objects. Both of the humans’ minds bloom with yellow fear, and she knows she has the advantage. She reacts instinctively.

  Not-Felicia propels herself out of the room, directly on top of this creature. The male body goes flailing backward, screaming hoarsely. The items it was holding tumble all over the ground.

  Not-Felicia’s body is frail, but she instinctively tries stabbing at the human with her head. She knows she can cause harm this way. But the other human, the father, crashes into her from behind, and she sprawls onto her back, directly into a large obstacle.

  The father screams, “Why’d you open that door?!”

  Not-Felicia regains cont
rol of her limbs and attempts to leap back toward the doorway—the objective firmly in mind—but her incarceration has left her limbs lethargic. She pushes herself across the floor, wary but purposeful. She has to get outside.

  These humans shouldn’t be conscious and self-aware. What happened?

  Something thunks into not-Felicia’s side, and she shrieks.

  Everything changes.

  She has never known bewildering pain like this. It’s a heat, centered at the impact point of whatever hit her, and it spreads rapidly, sparking and raging. She twists and trips, her vision kaleidoscopes, all of her muscles begin contracting in spasms. Her body is out of her control. She coughs, feeling her lungs heave and shudder. The coughs become screams, which launch from her throat, out of her control.

  “Nooo-ooo! Noo! Neeeeee—”

  Felicia falls heavily onto her back again, twisting and writhing. Pain engulfs her body, not quite like fire but more like electricity, and a great scraping pressure is building in her left shoulder. She has never felt such torture.

  “Huuuuuurts!” she screams out of her cramping mouth.

  The humans—

  —they’re people, two men, what are they doing?—

  —clamber away from her. She half-registers their sounds but doesn’t care about anything but the torture burning through her veins. Her shoulder is a glowing ember. Liquid springs helplessly from her eyes.

  —tears—

  Her foot catches some boxed merchandise on a shelf, knocking a stack to the floor. She’s in a grocery store. Why is she in a grocery store?

  It’s the Co-Op.

  She’s at work.

  At the thought, her consciousness expands like a balloon, filling her, and the sensation is that of bursting back to awareness, to breathing after near-drowning.

  Thoughts ricochet as she squirms, and she sees that one of the humans—one of the men—is staring at her, and she knows this man, this father, he’s one of her customers, but what has happened, what has happened to cause this pain, this all-encompassing pain that nearly blinds her? She blinks hard, feeling sensory information flood her like something boiling. It’s too much, inside and outside of her! She whips her head back and forth. And now the man is leaving the store, and why won’t he help her? Why is he going away? Because he has done this to her? What’s happening?