As one, with terrifying speed, they flick their heads up. Their eyes meet hers.
They’re confused, shocked, slack-jawed, and in this small slice of time Sissy points the gun down—
One of them leaps through the space where the back wall used to be. Its hands slap down on top of the roof, its legs swinging up and over. As soon as its pale face crests over the roofline, like the rising moon, Sissy is ready. She fires a round right into its face.
Its head disappears in an explosion of white spray.
Yet its headless body still holds on. Legs scrabbling for purchase on the elevator roof, its arms swinging at her. Claws, black and razor sharp, miss her face by millimeters. Sissy kicks out, thumping it on the chest. The headless dusker falls down the glassy throat of the atrium, its arms still swinging, legs still kicking.
A smack from below. With such force, Sissy is bounced off the roof a few inches.
She flips herself on all fours, facing down. She aims the gun at the duskers beneath, is pulling the trigger. Then stops. If she shoots through the glass ceiling, it’ll shatter and she’ll fall into their very midst.
But it doesn’t matter, because in the next instant a dusker leaps up. Its head crashes through the glass roof as if surfacing out of water. The whole roof shatters, splintering into a thousand pieces and raining down on the duskers below. Sissy, screaming, falls into the interior of the elevator car, now really only a horizontal platform, without ceiling, without walls, still ascending.
The force of the fall pushes her right through them. Her back thunks against the hard floor, dislodging the gun from her grasp. It bounces once off the floor, then falls into the atrium. Walls of white-pale flesh tower over her; she’s trapped in the tangle of their legs, ankles, shins. There’s no way out. She’s penned in.
It’s strange, the things she observes. It’s not the obvious. Not the gleam of wet desire in their eyes, the dripping fangs, their cheeks wobbling wildly, smacking loudly against rows of teeth. But she instead notices the vibration of the elevator engine humming against her back, the wall on her right rushing past her as the elevator continues to ascend. The glimmers of dusk light slipping through the tiny gaps between their enclosing bodies. She is looking everywhere but at them because, she realizes with the slow-motion clarity of one knowing the end is near, she doesn’t want her last vision to be of duskers.
She thinks of Ben.
And David.
Epap.
Jacob.
Gene. Her lonely Gene, her sad Gene, her unreachable Gene. Years ago, when she was only a child, she dreamed a dream. Of a boy she had never seen and did not know. She woke up and stared through the glass dome at the starry sky. For the first time, her little girl’s heart felt its own emptiness. She never believed this boy was anything more than a figment of her imagination, and over the years the memory of this dream faded. Until that day about a fortnight ago when she saw his stick figure walking toward her, a wavering, trembling dark line on the desert horizon, a mirage gradually, miraculously, filling out and finding form. His bangs blowing in the wind, his teeth so white, his eyes so haunted and real.
She thinks of the dome. Her prison. Her home. By now, with dusk coming to a close, the dome has risen out of the desert ground. She imagines what it must look like now, with onyx dusk rays beaming off its glassy, globular surface. She thinks of the pond inside the dome, its surface flat and still as a mirror, of the mud huts that sit empty and uninhabited, as they will for centuries and millennia to come—
And in that last second of existence, she closes her eyes. She feels so terribly, terribly alone.
45
I RUN INTO the elevator lobby. Slam up against the glass door. Peer down the atrium. At first, I can’t quite comprehend what I’m seeing. The elevator, stripped of walls and roof and reduced to a platform, is rising toward me, about twenty floors below. White-pale blobs swirling on the platform. And for just a millisecond, there is a part in the bodies and I catch a glimpse of Sissy. Her face oddly placid.
The gun fires in my hand before I’m even aware of aiming or pulling the trigger. The bullet punctures a hole into the soft, pale mass, a meter from Sissy. The bodies ripple like a flag in the wind; one body keels over and falls off the platform, down into the atrium, splattering when it hits the marble floor of the lobby. But the other bodies seem unaffected as ever.
I pull the trigger again. Click. The chamber is empty.
The elevator, still ascending, is now about fifteen floors below. Too far below to leap—from this height, I’ll likely bounce right off the platform and down the atrium to my death. But there’s no time to spare. I bend my knees, leap out. Wind gushes through my clothes; my lungs ram up my throat. I plummet, arms pirouetting, toward the ascending platform.
46
SISSY
THE DUSKERS CAVE in on Sissy. They hiss loudly, their rank breath whistling between their exposed teeth and fangs.
So dark under them, so cold.
Everything happens so quickly, afterward she will barely be able to recall what happened.
A gunshot. Then a falling blur. The shape of something smacking into the duskers from above. A sickening splat. Someone crashing to the floor. With such force, it causes the whole platform to gong and hum.
The duskers domino into one another, plummet down the atrium. Leaving only one dusker on the platform, dizzy and concussed, temporarily out of commission.
Whoever just crashed down is now bouncing toward the edge, about to fall off.
Afterward, she will not know what possessed her to reach out. But still curled on the elevator floor, she snaps out her arm at the hazy shape skidding away.
Fingers wrap around her wrist. The shape falls over the edge, still gripping her.
And now she is being pulled across the platform. To avoid sliding any farther, she hooks her feet around the ankles of the disoriented—but quickly reviving—dusker.
Her face is pulled over the precipice, and she stares down the vertigo-inducing drop of the atrium. Fallen duskers lie far below, splattered on the lobby floor. Glass shards scattered everywhere.
And Gene, his face directly below hers, his sweaty hand clasped in hers. Slipping out.
The dusker shakes its head, hissing. Its eyes turn to Sissy.
Sissy and Gene stare at each other desperately. “Help me,” they both utter at the same time.
47
“HELP ME,” I whisper through clenched teeth.
“Gene,” Sissy says. Her eyes do the rest of the speaking. They are pleading with me. Because she can’t hold me much longer.
A dark shape looms above her. It’s a dusker.
“Sissy!” I shout. “Let go of me.”
Still she holds on. Its shadow falls over her.
I let go of her hand. In that same moment, she flips over to face the dusker.
For a moment, I’m suspended in air, touching nothing but the emptiness of a vacuum. I begin to fall. With a shout, I grasp for something—anything—and my hand catches a thick outcropping at the bottom of the elevator floor. I scrabble for purchase until my hands meet the metal framework of the elevator and I’m able to pull my whole body up and over onto the elevator floor. Gravity presses down on me as the elevator continues to rise.
Sissy is holding the dusker by the cuff of its neck. She’s the weaker creature, but not now, not after what the dusker’s been through. Its skin and joints and muscles and bones have softened under the burn of sun rays, and it is now more soft putty than hard bone and muscles. Digging into some hidden reserve of energy, Sissy slams its head into the wall that’s still rushing down past us. And she holds it there, the skull that’s been softened by the sun into the consistency of an unshelled boiled egg. And even though the dusker fights back, flailing its arms and trying to kick, Sissy doesn’t ease up one bit. She holds its head pressed against the passing wall, and like cheese being grated, its head is shredded into oblivion.
The elevator reaches the top floor.
/>
Ping.
48
UTTERLY EXHAUSTED, WE crawl out of the elevator. To keep the elevator from descending and picking up more duskers from the lower floors, we pull the headless dusker across the precipice. The body will prevent the doors from fully closing. For a while, anyway. Like persistent toothless jaws, the doors will open and close on it, open and close, gnawing the gelatinous body. Eventually, they’ll ground the dusker to into a soppy mush, enabling them to fully close.
I look at Sissy. Her clothes are splattered with a white-yellow creamy substance. Dusker fluid. She is staring out the window, at the disappearing sunlight, her hair bejeweled with glistening shards of glass. She looks ten years older than the day we first met at the pond. All the innocence beneath her skin has cauterized into hardness.
“Epap?” she asks.
I shake my head.
Her eyes well up, but no tears fall.
I take off my splattered shirt. Using the less filthy underside, I wipe clean the sticky fluid from her lips, cheekbones, nose. I dab her tears, gently wipe her eyelashes to remove the gooey droplets before they can dry and glue her eyes shut. The last few dying rays of dusk light fade from the sky. In the streets below, a sea of black creeps up the façades of nearby buildings, floor by floor.
We should be moving, thinking of a way to escape. But for now, all I can do is pick out the glass beads from her hair, one piece at a time.
“We were idiots,” she says, her voice whittled to a whisper. “Walked right into a trap.” She looks at me. “Did you get scratched anywhere? Cut, bitten?”
I don’t answer, only stare outside.
“No?” she asks.
“Does it matter anymore?” I say.
“What are you saying?” She gazes at me quizzically.
“Nothing,” I whisper. I wipe the gooey mess off her arms, dislodging something tucked into her pocket. It clatters to the ground.
“I found it on the fifty-ninth floor,” she says when I pick it up. It’s a pair of shades.
Just then, a chorus of screams and howls breaks out from all corners of the Domain Building. Even the floor starts trembling, like a quickening. Ashley June was right. There must be thousands in this building alone. And millions more in the adjacent buildings stirring awake.
“Let’s move away,” says Sissy. Her hand slips into mine, and our fingers interlace as we walk to the other end of the floor.
Sissy leads us to the conference room, the farthest point from the elevator. The dark interior of the Panic Room is empty now. Ashley June gone. The bottom of the Panic Room has given way to a dark chute that tunnels down to floors below.
“Gene,” Sissy says. “We break this glass, slide down the chute. Maybe that’ll buy us some time.”
But I shake my head. “Then we’ll have, what, fifty more floors to get through before we reach the lobby? With each floor crowded with who knows how many duskers? We’re outnumbered. We’re out of weapons. We won’t get past one floor, much less fifty.”
Across the street, a window of a facing skyscraper smashes outward. A dusker scuttles down the face of that building, over the ledges of each floor. It is joined by many more duskers, pouring through the same smashed window, three, four, a dozen duskers. They’ve heard the screams and wails coming from this building, have recognized the pitched heper excitement in the cries. They know we’re here. They all know. Another window, a few panes down, smashes outward. And another, another, until glass is falling like rain from a few dozen different spots on that side of the building. And just like that, in another nearby skyscraper, another windowpane explodes outward. Duskers slide out, like teardrops gliding down.
“There’s got to be a way out,” Sissy says. “Some way to get to ground level.”
“And then what?” I lay my hand on the side of her face. “We have a few minutes. Maybe five, tops. Let’s just … let’s just stop running. Go out on our terms. Pretend it’s just you and me and none of them. For just these last few moments. Can we do that, Sissy?”
“We fight this, Gene. We keep going.”
“Sissy—”
“No, there’s always some way out. Some way to fight for another minute, another second—”
“—Sissy—”
“—we’ll find a horse on the street, we can at least try—”
“—Sissy—”
“—that’s what we’ve always done, Gene! Survive. Then we get back to the Palace, we get David—”
“Sissy.” My voice soft, tender. And one last time, I whisper her name. “Sissy.”
I don’t need to say any more. I feel something inside her bend, then break. For the first time in her life, for the only and last time, she knows surrender. She gasps, eyes widening. This is a new emotion, an unwanted one. It is a gale of ice wind to her hot, fervent, beating heart.
Outside, duskers are now pouring down the sides of every skyscraper and sprinting along the streets toward the Domain Building. The race is on; the Hunt has begun. The spoils go to the few, the swift, the risk takers, those willing to endure the piercing-sharp effects of the last rays of dusk. The sight of so many jumping the gun convinces even the more cautious to leap out as well. The dominos are falling now. Every dusker in a ten-block radius is pushing out of skyscrapers, sweat out of pores, pus out of pimples.
“Gene,” she whispers. She can barely say the next words. “Is this really the end?”
I can’t say anything. I can’t even nod. I can only look deep into her eyes.
We fall into each other, embracing with crushing strength. We hold tightly, as if to form a shield against the brutal and gruesome end that will surely and swiftly come.
I pull away to look into her eyes. I want to see only her, not the horrific outside.
Sissy stares uncertainly at me, then gives a shaky smile.
I return the smile. “I wish this was all a horrible nightmare. And then we wake up and everything is gone, all the buildings, all the duskers, and it’s just you and me.”
“And we’re lying in green meadows,” Sissy says, her eyes drawing close, wet and soft and glimmering, “a rainbow over us, the sun warm and sweet in the pure blue sky. Our cottage a short walk away, beside a gentle brook.”
“Trees, too. Fruit trees.”
“And milk and honey and—”
“—sunshine.” I lean forward and our lips touch with tenderness, an antidote to the violence that is to come. Regret and sadness rise up in me, and then we’re kissing hungrily, lips pressing with desperation, as if to make up for the kisses we should already have shared, as if to compress all the thousands of denied kisses from the years that now will never come.
The sun disappears, its wilting rays suddenly cut off. The world plunges into darkness.
And now the walls and floor begin to vibrate with more force. Sissy and I pull apart. The duskers—the thousands of them—have reached the Domain Building and are now slithering up its glass walls. They skid across the glass like leeches, gaining traction on one another’s smeared flesh. As they climb higher, their slimy yellow-pale bodies further darken the building’s interior.
They reach the top floor in less than a minute. Panting with exertion, rib cages jutting out of membranous skin. Mushed against the glass, they gawk at us with eyes agog, the squeak of slipping, sliding skin on glass deafening. Many are thumping their fists against the windows in an attempt to break through, even slamming their foreheads into the glass. But on the slippery wall they lack the traction necessary to deliver a sufficiently forceful blow.
Loud thumps suddenly explode from inside the Panic Room. Duskers have flown up the chute from the floors below and into the tight confines of the Panic Room. There’s no time or room for them to spin around; another flurry of bodies follow quickly behind, ramming them until more than a dozen bodies are crammed into that tight space. And still more press in from below. No wonder Ashley June booked out of there. I hear the squish of flesh, the breaking of bones. Arms, hands, faces, legs, mashed
up against the glass, too packed to move even a finger. Nothing moves in there except one blinking eye.
Cold enshrouds us. Bestial wails assail us from every direction.
“Look at me, Gene.” Sissy’s eyes are warm and steady, her fingers interlacing with mine with crushing force. “Don’t look anywhere else. Just at me.”
Wet, squishy sounds. From under the glass floor, beneath my feet, a sea of pale bodies. Like raw fatty meat stored in clear plastic bags, their flattened faces glare at us, lips misshapen and pinched white. Oodles of saliva shine wetly between narrow creases and folds of bodies.
Metal beams groan, the shatter of glass drawing closer.
“This is it, Sissy.” I wish I didn’t have to shout. Not now. Not to Sissy. And the only thing I want to say to her is, Forgive me for letting you down, forgive me, forgive me.
She nods before I can say more, as if she can hear the thoughts in my head, as if she understands. And her eyes suddenly seem more alive than ever, full of daring. She says something I can’t hear.
“What?” I shout.
And a small smile touches her lips, full of sadness, full of release. She leans in and shouts into my ear words never uttered to me.
“I love you.”
49
I DON’T WANT to die. I don’t want her to die.
I don’t want us to die.
And suddenly, I know how we live.
50
I RACE OVER to the table, pulling Sissy along with me.
“Gene?”
There’s no time to explain what I’m doing. In the dark, it takes me a second to locate it on the table. There. I grab it—the hypodermic needle Ashley June left for me to use. I thrust the needle into the crook of my arm, depress the needle halfway down.
“Do you trust me, Sissy?” I say.
“What are you—”
I pull her shirt sleeve up, inject her. She doesn’t resist or flinch, only stares at me. I push the remaining fluid into her bloodstream.
The Trap (The Hunt Trilogy) Page 20
