Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 Page 13

  Yet she was going up the stairs now. She was moving away from her safety, forced to face whatever her mind decided need not be faced, need not even be named.

  The further she walked, the less light escaped from the first floor, and soon she walked in darkness, alone. She felt slowly with her feet, making sure she didn’t stumble, because with each step, she realized how far she was from the bottom. The staircase seemed to stretch forever, with no ending in sight.

  Alas, though, her foot felt no other step in front of it, and she realized she stood on the second floor of her mind. She looked down the hall, and she could see rooms, encased in darkness except for tiny words outlined in red lights above them. She couldn’t make out the words from where she stood, but she thought she knew at least what some of them said.

  Her feet started walking again, perhaps so her eyes could confirm what she thought.

  22

  Bolivia

  Rigley was twenty-eight years old when Bolivia happened. Twenty-eight, married and pregnant. She didn’t really have a life plan, but there seemed to be a general path to follow for her and her husband. She worked for the NSA and he an insurance company. The money would come from his job, the security and benefits from hers. Their daughter—well, that was probably the most unplanned thing about it all. Not that the pregnancy wasn’t planned, but at twenty-eight, who understood how to raise a child, let alone what would happen?

  The bleeding started at around midnight, two weeks before Bolivia started making waves. It could have been one in the morning, or a little before midnight, but those are just details. Sometimes details can bog down purpose. Rigley woke up, her midsection feeling like tiny, metal bees were flying around inside her, their stingers large and bristled with spikes. She ran to the bathroom, crying, knowing—somehow knowing what this meant, regardless of anything else that it could have been—she was losing her baby.

  She found the toilet and refused to look down, even as she felt blood running out of her. She didn’t want to see it, couldn’t bear to look down and know what it meant.

  Geoff jumped from the bed, simultaneously shouting to her, putting clothes on, and calling nine-one-one. He acted perfectly, without a moment’s hesitation. She would, later, blame him for this. At least for a time. Someone had to be at fault for the child’s death. Blame needed to fall somewhere. When she looked back though, years later, she knew it had been no one’s fault. Maybe God’s, if there was one. All guilt rested on God for the death of her child.

  The ambulance arrived and they sped through the streets, Rigley alternating between squinting at the pain and staring up at the white lights of the ambulance, wondering how this was happening, how such pain was possible. There would be no girl, Elizabeth, or boy, Daniel.

  The scene played through as these do most of the time. Arrival at the hospital, sedation, exam by the attending physician, and finally a conversation.

  “It’s gone,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”

  And he looked sorry, genuinely to Rigley. There was compassion in his eyes, brown eyes that she would never forget, not up until the moment air stopped feeding her brain and she died.

  Geoff reached for her hand, and she let him hold it. She didn’t care though. She didn’t care if he held her hand or let it drop to her lap. It wasn’t that she stopped caring about Geoff completely, right then, but it certainly began.

  Some people, when tragedy occurs, it brings them together—they find comfort in the dark midst of pain they share with those they love.

  And others, well, they throw the world away.

  Two weeks later, Bolivia happened.

  * * *

  Will wanted to know what this pink shit wanted. He once was a curious person, with an insatiable need to know everything. Why, why, why. The whys lit the fire inside him as much as a job well done. The ‘whys’ part of the fire dwindled, though, as he aged. Forty wasn’t old, per se, but it wasn’t young either. He was in that middle state of development, the one where a person teeter-totters on the edge of life, one way tipping to death and the other to birth, with time always deciding you fall to death. No one fell the other way and Will knew he sat on that razor’s edge.

  He wasn’t as curious anymore; he just didn’t care about the whys behind things that happened. The whys didn’t matter as much anymore because all those things still happened no matter the reason. Military leaders decapitated civilians, religious fanatics chopped off girls’ clitorises, and things from other worlds showed up here. They needed to be dealt with, all of them, and the why that had once been so important just wasn’t anymore. Dealing with the problems, a job well done, that had slowly developed into the important piece. Keeping the world somewhat safe, that was important.

  Yet, Will wanted to know about this pink sponge growing everywhere. This was different. Very, very different. Things had landed before, things had grown up out of the ground that needed to be dealt with, but nothing like this. This shit here spread faster than anything Will had ever seen or heard about. Even now, it was stretching beyond the quarantine. Growing over the barriers, reaching out like something from a crypt, intent on killing those that wished to keep it silent and dead.

  At forty, Will knew his place in this, and he enjoyed it. He was a tool, a very delicate tool—a scalpel, say—one that could be used for swift and accurate action. The woman next to him in this room, he didn’t know if she was a tool or the hand that wielded the tool. He didn’t think she was the brain that directed the hand, because the brain always came into the room after everyone else was seated. She was young, and not looking at him one bit—just staring down at the papers in front of her, poring over the information that had been given to them. Will gave it a short look, but he didn’t see the why he wanted, so he passed on it. The brain or the hand would tell him what to do and that’s what mattered.

  This woman, though, she wanted to be the brain. Will saw that from the beginning of Bolivia. She read those papers like they contained a map to the Fountain of Youth. She was young, and pretty, but looked…too serious. Will knew how stupid that sounded, especially in a situation where they met five miles outside of Bolivia’s capital because they couldn’t use a single building inside, but it still fit. Will sat with his hands folded on his lap, looking at her, while she didn’t once look up from the papers, flipping to the next as soon as she finished the last. The set of her jaw, the squint of her eyes. This wasn’t her first trip to the field, it couldn’t be—they wouldn’t send someone green out to a place like this, so the seriousness came from somewhere else.

  The door to the room opened and three people walked in, all men, two generals wearing uniforms and one man in a suit. The woman next to Will stood up, but he didn’t move.

  “Please have a seat,” the man in the suit said, sitting himself without looking at the two of them, only opening his own folder with papers in it. “Will meet Rigley, Rigley, Will. My name isn’t important right now. Will, you control the street team. Rigley, you control Will. I’ll let you guys cover your own histories if you want to. What we have here is an adaptable, murderous situation.” The man looked up for the first time, finding Will. “You saw it on your way here, right? I made them drive you through it.”

  “Yes,” Will said.

  “It eats,” the man said. “It eats whatever it touches. We don’t know if it’s taking nutrients from its victims or simply breaking them down to remove obstacles. The city you drove through is probably a week away from being no more. Entire buildings have collapsed, as I’m sure you saw. The people that were caught in their buildings, they’re no more. Literally, like the rapture came and took them all away, not a single sign that they existed.”

  He paused for a second, as he closed his notebook.

  “You two are going to kill it.”

  23

  Present Day

  They weren’t talking to all these kids; there wasn’t time for it. Will had to trust technology to do the job for them. The three had each taken a third of
the list provided by the kid in school, and were moving down it systematically, moving from name to name after having mapped out their geographic locations to make sure they were limiting travel time. Andrew and Lane would check, periodically, to see if there had been a hit, but right now they were scanning and nothing more.

  The sun was below the horizon, and the moon on its way up, which was making this whole scanning thing difficult. During the daylight hours, Will had simply knocked on doors; if someone answered, he showed the badge, making up a story for twenty to thirty seconds, and then headed to the next house. Lane said that’s all it took, twenty seconds, and the tracker could pick up enough information to understand the living contents of the house. When people didn’t answer, Will opened the door—one way or another—and stood for a few seconds as the tracker did its work, then left. There would be a rash of breakin reports to the local police department tonight, but it didn’t matter. Tomorrow the whole town might not be here.

  The sun was gone though, and that meant people were home, and it was odd to have a policeman coming to the house this late—it would mean longer conversations, but Will didn’t have any choice.

  Thera Erwin was the next name on his list. He sat in her driveway, the black SUV as official looking as he could get in this short amount of time. He didn’t waste time looking at the house or thinking about what he would say; he opened the door, got out, and started his march up the hilled driveway to the front door. Lights were on inside and cars were parked in front of him, so he wouldn’t need to breakin, which was good.

  He rang the doorbell, his badge out, and the same story he’d used all day on the tip of his tongue.

  The light on the porch turned on, and then the door opened, revealing a teenage girl in front of him. Thera Erwin, looking exactly like the picture he downloaded on his way here.

  “Hi, my name is Dennis Gables and I’m with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. How are you doing tonight, ma’am?”

  The girl looked at his badge for a few seconds, maybe five, and then slowly tilted her head from the badge to his eyes. She moved so slow that Will thought the girl might be handicapped. Did handicapped girls head to parties in fields, though?

  “I’m good,” she said, closing her mouth without a single spark of interest lighting in her eyes. No question as to why a cop would be at her door this late, flashing his badge. She looked at him as if he were an appliance, maybe a refrigerator.

  “I’m…” Will paused, looking past her into the foyer and the kitchen beyond, hearing a woman ask, Who is it?

  The girl, Thera, didn’t turn around to look at her mother, didn’t say anything back to her.

  “Yes?” Thera asked.

  Will looked back to her, not stunned, but thinking that he should kill her. Thinking that he should shoot her and walk in the house and shoot both the parents. He had no proof, nothing besides the way this girl stared at him, but it felt like he’d hit the mark, because something was wrong.

  He didn’t say anything, but just looked at her for a few more seconds.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I have the wrong house.”

  “Okay,” the girl said, taking a step back. She closed the door as Will stood there.

  He nearly ran back to the SUV, moving as fast as he could without looking ridiculous, and grabbing his phone from the seat as he did. Andrew’s number populated almost immediately and then the phone was ringing.

  It rang fifteen times before he hung up, quickly finding Lane’s number and dialing that. Again no answer.

  “The fuck,” he said, his voice low but anger filling it. The only time he really needed the two pissants and they weren’t there. They would call back, and they’d tell him what it was he just met—human or something else.

  * * *

  Thera stared out the window as the man hurried down the driveway to the black SUV, or rather, Morena did and Thera was allowed to watch. Something had just happened and Thera didn’t know what, exactly. She couldn’t trust herself right now, that was the only true, sane thing she knew. Whatever she felt, whatever she observed, she couldn’t trust it because she was on the verge of losing her mind. Bryan was here, though silent right now, probably seeing the same thing as her. Bryan was the only reason, the only single one, why she hadn’t fallen into insanity.

  Bryan let her go, let her rage inside their shared consciousness, not saying anything. She didn’t understand it, wasn’t able to conceptualize what was happening to her when those needles pierced her skin. The virus, as she now thought about it, had felt like ice moving through her face. It spread through her quickly, moving at the exact same speed her blood did, transferring from Bryan’s flesh to her own.

  And all at once, she went from in control of her mind—of her body—to simply replaced. It wasn’t even that she was shoved aside, just that whatever poisonous ice ran through her veins made her brain its home, and she was relegated to the side, to a corner. She watched as the creature took over the controls, almost visibly sitting down in a Captain Kirk’s chair and getting used to the feel of the new body. Thera struggled to move her body, to throw herself away from the needles breaking her skin open, but no movement came from her commands. Her body was not hers, it was this…other’s. The thing took its place as if it rightfully owned her, as if she was a ship to be used, and said nothing nor bothered to even recognize her as an entity.

  That’s when the shrieking started. When she realized that she mattered so little to whatever now controlled her, that it need not even acknowledge her existence.

  Hours of screaming, of begging, pleading with this thing to let her go, to release her from whatever grip it held. Nothing from it, as if it didn’t hear, as if she wasn’t there. She began wondering if she even existed and that turned the screaming into something…more dangerous. She began wondering if whatever experience this was, whatever she now saw, was real—or not real to anyone but her. That she had been placed into some dark corner, from which no one would hear her voice, from which she had no power and no chance of escape. And if that was the case, then what was she—was she something out of this new entity’s imagination? Did she exist at all?

  Bryan spoke up then, perhaps seeing the tunnel that path of thinking led down, a tunnel that he wouldn’t be able to pull her from no matter how hard he tried.

  “You exist,” he said, and her screams silenced in that moment. Those were the first words anyone had spoken to her since her mind became something else’s. “You’re here and I am too.”

  It was Bryan. Oh, God, it was Bryan and she could hear his voice. More emotions than she could identify rose up, not replacing the fear and shock, but mixing into some kind of disgusting soup that she was forced to drink.

  “You can’t start thinking those thoughts, Thera. I don’t think you can come back from them if you do,” he said, his voice calm. “Just listen to the sound of my voice, just hear me talk.”

  She listened while he talked, and her mind—if she had a mind anymore, or their mind, but those were questions she didn’t want to dive into just yet—slowed down some.

  When Bryan finished speaking, she stared at herself inside this brain, stared at Bryan, and stared at this creature Bryan called Morena. She stared and understood that she could do nothing. She was helpless, perhaps hopeless too. Bryan’s calm voice was his acceptance of that, was his acknowledgment that nothing he did in this cage would free them.

  “Who is he?” Morena asked, her voice sharp like a surgeon’s scalpel.

  Thera watched the cop climb into his SUV, then pull out into the road and drive off.

  “Who is he?” Morena said.

  “I don’t know,” Thera said, honestly. She wasn’t going to lie to this creature; Bryan had warned her of that. Lying meant pain and she somehow knew when either Bryan or Thera wasn’t being truthful.

  “What happened?” Something occurred at the door, they all knew it, everyone in this totalitarian ran consciousness. That man, Dennis Gables, wasn’t…but n
o one had any idea what he had shown up for. No one knew, so no one could say he wasn’t here for what he pretended to be. He showed up, looked at Thera, and then left.

  “The government,” Bryan said. “He’s with the government.”

  “What the fuck is the government?” Morena asked, the word fuck sounding more hateful than the words surrounding it. Bryan had said she was picking up vulgarity from him, seeming to relish in it like a bee with honey.

  “You didn’t land here without anyone knowing, Morena. Whatever you used to be, we have people like that here. Different, but similar, and I think that man at the door was looking for you. I think he knows he found you,” Bryan said.

  A cold silence moved through Thera, and certainly through Bryan too. It sent a chill down her spine, though she had no control over it. Morena was understanding, realizing the mistake she had just made.

  “What will the government do?” she asked, the anger in her voice gone, replaced with death. That might be the only thing Thera understood about this creature, this Morena. She would kill anything and everything. She would burn this world to the ground if…but Thera didn’t know the if. Neither she nor Bryan knew what this creature wanted with them, what it wanted with this planet. It kept those thoughts from them, but whatever it wanted, it would kill for. That cold silence moving through them both, that was death. The complete absence of life and this creature’s perfect acceptance of the need to spread it outside of her consciousness.

  Bryan sighed, and Thera couldn’t tell if it was exasperation at explaining this to Morena, or something else. “It means they’re coming for you. I keep telling you, over and over, that you aren’t adapting. That people can tell a difference. It’s even worse with Thera. I don’t know why, but you have less control over her than me. That guy is probably calling a bunch of other guys and they’re probably all going to be out here within an hour.”