Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 6

  “Do you need morphine?” Michael asks.

  She barely hears him.

  As her body quivers with its myriad physical maladies, she narrows her thoughts on the thing that was inside her. It’s almost as if a snake has slithered through her, leaving its skin behind. Except the skin is pulsing with lingering life. She feels it at a cellular level. And she can still feel the urgent need in those cells—as if it’s her own need.

  “What is it?” Michael whispers.

  “They—they—they—” Her mouth can’t make words! “They c—c …”

  How can she possibly describe the need, the objective, the thing they crave, to a surviving human being? And even if she could clarify the unprecedented thing that has happened to her, how can she get her mouth, her voice, to cooperate with her thoughts? It’s almost as if that small piece inside her, that remnant of other, is preventing her. Or trying to prevent her.

  “They …” Michael urges.

  Felicia closes her eyes, concentrating. “C—c—c—c—”

  “They …” he repeats. “They what?”

  Her body requires unconsciousness. It pulls at her. She feels her eyes closing, feels her thoughts drifting.

  “No, no!” Michael’s voice pleads, fading.

  And she’s gone, tumbling into blackness. At some point, a heavy blanket of numbness descends upon her, and she feels relief flood her.

  She floats in emptiness.

  As she eventually drifts back to the world, she becomes aware of imagery, of lingering foreign memory. She feels the ghost of the urgent need that possessed her before, she feels it strongly but from a remove. The scratching, throaty insistence of it. Like desperate hunger. The power of it humbles her. She’s never felt anything like it. Somewhere deep inside, she likens it to thirst. The most burning thirst she can possibly imagine—not only the thirst of one person fighting for survival but the thirst of …

  She feels as if she’s grasping something, but as it begins to form, it breaks apart as she approaches waking life.

  Life.

  She comes out of her dream state in agony again. She works her jaw, still feeling that phantom hunger. Or is it phantom? She feels disassociated from it and yet aghast at its depth.

  Michael is directly above her, watching her. How long has he been there?

  Her jaw clicks, and she swallows a dry lump of pain. Something awful has happened to her throat, and the area above and around it. She should be in a hospital; she should be in surgery right now. She feels it innately. She also knows that something has happened to the world to make it impossible for her to get the care she needs.

  She has sustained some kind of life-changing injury, she fears. But what? She’s sure that something was inside her—a life form got into her mouth, or ear—but what was it, and what did it do in there? She shudders at the thought of some kind of … insect … burrowing into her and attaching itself leechlike.

  What did it do to her?

  It.

  This thing inside her.

  She knows what it was. Her connection to it was intimate. It was inside her, quite literally. Perhaps it still is. Yes, she knows it still is. At least, part of it is. There is something still in there.

  She shivers at the notion. Her teeth won’t stop chattering.

  She remembers the visions she had. She saw what it saw. Is that it? Not quite. She read its thoughts. She thought its thoughts. Yes, she knew its memories, she knew its needs. Felt its thirst.

  And she can still feel all these things.

  She stares at Michael, tries to focus on his eyes.

  “I—I—I ….”

  She shakes her head angrily, stubbornly through the pain. Her thoughts won’t gel, won’t become cohesive. Frustrated, she reaches out and grabs his hand. The motion causes more pain, but it’s manageable. She closes her eyes and concentrates.

  “They …” she says, swallowing and cringing. “… life.”

  “Life?” Michael repeats.

  “D—d—dying.”

  There’s some kind of commotion beyond Michael.

  He squeezes her hand gently. “Life, death … which one?”

  Felicia shakes her head.

  “Inside,” she says, eyes shut. “D—d—dying.”

  He says, “And the trees have what they need?”

  Felicia opens her eyes, thoughts sparking.

  The objective.

  “Neeeeed.”

  “Pain relievers now?” Michael whispers.

  Grateful, she nods, and together they manage to get some bitter-tasting liquid down her throat. She grimaces and lies back while Michael turns away.

  “Neeeed,” she whispers again.

  Unconsciousness takes her like a dream of nature, floating amongst the trees, and she’s gone.

  CHAPTER 7

  She wakes to a pulse of negative energy. Her ears pop, and her eyes open, flooded with moisture. She takes in a sharp breath.

  They’re speaking to her.

  They.

  Around her, the humans are dropping to the ground, covering their ears. She hears the sound as they hear it—a gargantuan blast of thunder, incessant, like a meteor tearing a rift in the atmosphere, making the face of the earth cower. But inside the sound—to her ears—is a strange and elegant music. The notes are filled with imperatives, yes, but also beauty. Seduction. Her chest fills with heat, arching from the floor despite the pain of movement. She focuses on the dim tiles of the library ceiling, imagining that she can see the source of this music. The trilling throats and curved necks, the angled limbs, the piercing eyes.

  But what she is seeing is the objective.

  A new objective.

  The humans.

  The humans who were never meant to survive.

  But they did—and they’re a threat.

  Music floods her, and inside the notes, inside the rhythm, is strategy. But it is only partially there, whispering at her. She understands it, but her hold on that knowledge is tenuous. And when the communication breaks up, and the skies fall silent, it leaves her like a fever breaking.

  She exhales loudly, emptily. Then her eyes clear.

  What happened?

  A lingering sense of nausea pervades her consciousness, of something slimy having slid through her innards. Something foreign. Her lip curls. She comes to the realization that, in that moment of communication, she would gladly have killed a human being with her own hands.

  She shudders.

  There’s an older woman on the ground outside the door—

  —this is Bonnie, a woman made to help those around her, all her life, she studied it and she practices it, and now, after everything that has happened in the past few days, she feels that she is faced with her life’s purpose, there’s a reason she’s still alive, and it is to ensure that these survivors remain survivors, especially the women and the girls, because if what she dreads is true, they are the key to the future of the human race, and although she is past the age to make a difference in that sense, she can surely help to make sure that others remain, and what greater good can she as a caregiver provide? Only occasionally is she cognizant of how quickly she has set aside thoughts of her husband and grown children, whom she knows are gone, she will think of them later, there will be time for that, for grief, when these plucky survivors have finally conquered this thing, but good sweet Lord, she doesn’t know how much more of this she can take …

  —and she’s peering around, dazed. Bonnie and Felicia lock eyes for a split second, and then Bonnie is on her feet, heading toward what Felicia assumes is the front of the library.

  In a moment there are raised voices, and beneath them Felicia can feel a low rumble.

  It’s them.

  She can sense them. Coordinated and desperate. Coming together like the single organism they are, attacking this resilient band. Exploiting what it sees as a moment of weakness.

  She pushes past the pain into a seated position. Survivors are running this way and that beyond th
e door, screaming. Felicia tries to stand, fails. She has to warn them. Right? Tears stream helplessly from her eyes. She tries again to stand and manages to get to her knees. She needs to find a window. All around her is the sound of mad scrambling, bodies scraping and surging. She can hear their gasps—

  —and they are beautiful! Beautiful and fierce in their determination, and she can feel them, all of them, a roiling collective of alien souls, desperate, hungry, and they are approaching, they are so close—

  She uses the corner of a desk to pull herself to wobbly feet, crying out in agony. Using the desktop as an anchor, she drags herself to the inner doorway, in time to watch through madly watering eyes a wave of bodies approaching the library, an interconnected mass of flesh like a tangible embodiment of the web of souls, churning, roiling. The surge of infected bodies stretches as wide as her vision, and she feels her breath stop in the middle of her throat, watching the inexorable approach of this thing that is at once impossible and beautiful. Then the bodies upon bodies slam against the thick windows. Bodies upon bodies, darkening the library.

  Felicia stares into the eyes of the—

  —strangers—

  —once-human bodies glaring in. She wipes her eyes, tries desperately to focus.

  They see her. She knows it.

  She sees something in their eyes.

  They know her.

  She’s one of them.

  No, she is not.

  She feels as if she might faint. She lowers her head, closes her eyes, and more tears stream out. All around her, a cacophony of sound, pandemonium.

  The survivors shout at one another, alternately determined and hopeless. Felicia can taste the humans’ fear. A battle has been brought to their doors, and they are woefully unprepared for it. They number a handful, and the strangers number in the thousands. This little band of survivors is going to lose. Each one of them can feel it. Each one knows that his or her death is upon them. They are no match for the unified threat that literally surrounds them, the writhing mass of former humanity whose objective, now, is to end them.

  Felicia feels that new objective like an itch, a pull toward vicious action. She can strike from within!

  She pushes that thought away.

  No!

  She brings weak arms to her head, trying to block it all out. But muffling auditory and visual stimuli only enhance her new ability, this outrageous curse—is she dreaming it?—and her entire consciousness seems filled with shards of thoughts, flitting sensory blips, every tiny moment that those around her are experiencing.

  —Kevin in primal survival mode, throwing his bulk at a melting window and firing his weapon into the wall of alien-puppeteered flesh, his mind a bleary glut of adrenaline and focus—

  —the twins, Zoe and Chloe, their minds remarkably similar and single-purposed in their response to extreme stimuli, exhibiting intensive control over their survival, aiming a blood-packed tranquilizer rifle and a heavy AR-15 at the incoming bodies, calm in the face of ripped flesh—

  —even Scott, his mind fractured under stress and chemical addiction, entering the fray, feeling the pull to action, defending his right to exist from these marauders, his mind a screaming gush of frustrated fury—

  —and as Felicia acknowledges the common consciousness of the strangers, the web of attacking souls outside the library, she coughs, recognizing nearly the same in the human survivors, the will to live, the fight to live, and she understands the mistake the strangers have somehow made.

  The library is suddenly a warzone, exploding with violence. She wraps her arms more tightly around her head, muffling the sounds coming from everywhere. Gunshots, screaming, running, throbbing. It’s too much. It’s impossible.

  She’s about to fall. She carefully backs into the book-returns room. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but it doesn’t matter, because finally she does fall to a heap beside the desk. There are so many voices, so many thoughts, so many mindscapes, screaming back and forth in the main hall that she can’t get the sense of them. Closing her eyes, she sees those upturned faces considering her, taking the measure of her.

  “No!” she moans.

  She doesn’t want any part of this.

  She wants to be at home with Nicole—

  Nicole!

  —to be wrapped in her arms on a quiet Sunday morning, breakfast in bed, listening to music or binge-watching a TV show on Netflix. It’s the first time she’s thought of Nicole since she returned, and at the thought, blurry tears spring to her eyes.

  The carnage seems to go on forever.

  Finally, the clamor of warfare slows, and the library is left pulsing rhythmically with crimson light. Felicia can sense the strangers’ directive inside it, the impulse to end the human resistance, and she also senses the human despair among the survivors, their hope dwindling, their exhaustion becoming resignation, their weapons beginning to empty of ammunition and fall to the ground. There’s nothing more to do.

  —can’t possibly—

  —it’s over—

  —so this is how I die—

  She feels as if she has awoken at the end of a long, terrible battle, and she understands only partially why it is taking place. She’s experiencing it in broken pieces, bewildered by not only her pain but also the barrage of mindscapes fluttering into and out of focus. It’s beyond her comprehension, furthermore—as she, for a moment, clears her vision to behold what’s happening—the reality of these formerly human bodies crammed against the outer walls of the library, their minds filled with the presence of the strangers, about to prevail.

  And then she feels a surge.

  It’s Michael.

  He’s hurt.

  Felicia feels his mind turn brightly toward Rachel.

  —everything in their shared life hangs in the humid air: every mistake, every joy, every laugh, every tear. The image of Rachel in his hands, tiny and fragile at the hospital, surges forward, pressing at his eyes—washing over him and through him. Holding his hand at the mall, giggling like crazy at some shared game at the arcade. Jumping into his lap at Christmas and hugging him hard. Twirling with him in the back yard under the evening sun, as Cassie watches from her chair on the porch. Eyeing him mischievously over a game of chess. Proudly sharing a graded essay. Crying with him, her head at his shoulder, at the hospital while Cassie lies dying. And yes, the yelling, the defiance. Waking to find her hefting that shotgun, there with him at the end. At the beginning. And shrinking now to a tiny dot, behind all this, is his crime. His betrayals. He was never destined to survive this thing. A peaceful warmth overtakes him—

  “Oh no,” Felicia whispers.

  Something compels her to rise. Screaming, she laboriously gains her feet, and staggers to the doorway. She stares out, blinking madly to clear her vision of endless tears. She watches Michael preparing syringes with blood—

  —O-negative blood—

  —and then sprinting toward a melted-in window—a window that the strangers compromised with their inner energy, their heat—where the wall of flesh awaits. He thrusts his body out into the fray, using the syringes to deliver short stabs of blood, pumping bursts of it into every body he can reach, and the air is filled with screams.

  Felicia feels the shock and pain among the strangers.

  A brief, sharp shock.

  But it won’t be enough.

  The survivors are doomed.

  Unless …

  Felicia strides forward toward her own window, which the bodies have also breached. Instinctively, she pushes outward with all her strength, all the strength she has, and she can almost see it as a physical force—her energy ripples outward in shockwaves, pushing the bodies back from the window and the wall. They tumble down and away like a child’s playthings, lifeless, powerless, squealing. She reaches the wide-open window and stares out at the scene, a battlefield of bodies, both infected and turned back, human and stranger, agony and fury. The sky broils with activity, as if watching her, considering her.


  What did I do? she whispers inside herself.

  And a new emotion she feels among the strangers for the first time. Bodies scurry away from her, like a breaking wave.

  Fear.

  CHAPTER 8

  “NOOO!”

  Rachel stares at her father, her breath caught in shock.

  She feels as though she’s been slammed in the gut. Her face burns beneath a mask of blood, and her hands scrabble at the ground, her mind caught between instincts to embrace him and to scramble away from this horrible scene.

  This can’t be happening.

  Just as she starts to choke, her breath returns in a rush, and she’s screaming at her dad, tears in her eyes, splashing on his face. She grabs his shoulders and pulls at him, willing him back to consciousness, but his body is unresponsive deadweight. She wipes at his face, clearing it of blood.

  “Daddy, no, please no, you can’t go!”

  One of the remaining bodies scurries past her, cranked hideously backward, and she kicks at it, furious. There are other bodies retreating from the library, but there’s no more focus to them. They’re merely fleeing. Did her dad do this? He did, didn’t he? He saved them all, and he’s killed himself in the process. Her dad is dying!

  He’s staring at her, but she can see his pupils dilating. She can see it happening, even as she pleads.

  Suddenly she notices that he’s raising a weak, trembling hand, and he touches her cheek, but then the hand falls away. She grabs at his fingers, and sobs cough out of her.

  “Please don’t leave me, Daddy, please!” she screams, straining. “I love you, Daddy, I love you so much, please don’t leave!”

  Rachel cups his face with her hands, turning it toward her. She leans over and clutches him into an embrace. There’s no response. And then Kevin angles in next to her, enormous, settling her father to the ground and beginning chest compressions. Kevin is breathing heavily and yelling, “Mike! Mike! Wake up! Stay with me! Mike!”

  Rachel’s own breath comes in quick gasps, and black spots throb in her vision. Her dad’s skin is going ashen.