Sound erupts from her in a throaty gasp.
Then the man, the father, is back, hovering over her, and she locks eyes with him. He’s blurry behind inconceivable pain. She blinks hard, desperately.
“Helllppp!!” she cries.
The man takes hold of her flailing arms and begins to pull her toward the front door, and her skin and bones scream in chaos. She shrinks inside herself, cowering, while her body clenches in torture. Stuttered sounds are choking out of her mouth, but she has no control over them. Her tongue lashes against her teeth.
“All right, all right!” she hears from somewhere. It’s the other man—
—the policeman—
—hurrying toward them. Felicia instinctively twists away from both of the men so that she can fall to the ground and be still—for God’s sake, be still!—but the policeman takes hold of her feet, and her body goes swinging into the air.
Torment.
Her eyes bug and turn up in their sockets. Her jaw locks open, her breath caught deep in her throat. They’re carrying her. What have they done to her?
“Christ, you and your daughter, man!” the cop yells. “Cut from the same cloth!”
Felicia feels herself approaching unconsciousness, black spots blooming in her vision, but the man’s words bring her fluttering back.
The daughter.
The name comes to her like a whisper, somehow soothing— Rachel—the simple act of remembering. But no. She has read the name in the father’s consciousness.
And this is Michael.
Is that possible, that she can see these things? How?
Then the names are gone again, and she’s writhing in the men’s grip. Now her voice comes back, and an ugly gasp discharges from her throat. She bounces on the rear seats of a large vehicle, screeching. She recognizes the interior of the truck as quiet and soft, but she is utterly focused on her pain.
Make it stop!
All she knows is agony. The truck gargles to life and soon it’s rumbling across asphalt as she clenches screaming muscles. Her skull feels as if it has been hollowed out with a blunt tool. As if something has been pulled violently out—and yet residue remains.
What is that?
There’s something inside her. She feels it like a crawling thing, something slippery high in her throat. Whatever it is, it’s wounded and clamoring. Perhaps it is dying inside her. She retches at the thought, her throat screeching in protest.
The truck bounces and she moans. She opens her blurred eyes. Tears continue to stream from them.
Where is she? There are bright souls all around, scurrying. They are human beings.
Before shutting her eyes against the brightness, she catches glimpses of the corners of buildings and the tops of trees.
Trees.
The men are talking up front, but she can’t hear anything above the din of pain. And it is that: The agony is like a great, insurmountable wall of sound, devastating her eardrums.
The truck bounces violently, twice, and it’s all she can do to keep from biting her tongue off. Time bends and warps. The vehicle comes to a jarring stop, and the engine rattles to silence. There are voices, human voices. The first is female, but she can barely make it out—
—and then the voice coalesces into a contained and understandable stream of sensation, and Felicia realizes that she is not only hearing Rachel’s spoken words but also her thoughts. Behind the voice, the mindscape is shifty and thread-like, like a smoothly skipping needle atop a wet record. Synaptic sparks effortlessly merge with one another, skipping off on tangents, reacting to stimuli, moving like a constantly forking river in fast-forward. But there are understandable wisps of thoughts there, and Felicia feels as if she is in tune with Rachel’s chemical processes, with the electrical impulses in her brain. She can almost visualize them. She senses fear inside a multitude of anticipated worst-case scenarios, and she senses a black awe underneath everything that has happened to her.
But then pain blots it out.
“We heard some kind of explosion up that way,” Rachel says to her father, giving clear voice to her fears. “Thought you were done for.”
“Still alive,” Michael responds. “I keep dodging bullets, huh? We have a passenger. Where’s Bonnie?”
Gritting her teeth, Felicia focuses her inner gaze on Michael, whose mind is awash in relief to be back at the library, back to Rachel.
“She’s with the—”
“Bonnie!”
Felicia tries opening her eyes again. It takes Herculean effort. She wants to wipe the moisture from her eyes, but none of her muscles will cooperate. She can see shapes, she can see the silhouettes of people. And then Joel, the policeman, bends close to her, becoming momentarily clear in her vision, and his mind remains rigid and orderly, and there’s another man there, she sees his mindscape before his face looms close to hers, and—
—he is a younger man, his name is Ron, he is unsure of himself, thrust into a leadership role in the group and regretting it, his mind veering toward the fate of his father, who lives alone in Laporte, and with whom he shares the same blood type, but who is wheelchair-bound and helpless in his isolated home, and Jesus Christ why didn’t Ron try to go there when this first started, because now all he feels is a burning shame—
What was that about blood type? When what started?
Felicia’s pain is enormous, unwilling to let her see more, but she’s startled by the sudden knowledge of this man’s thoughts. How is she seeing that? It’s as if, in his proximity, the thoughts have become hers. And when he pulled away, the thoughts faded. Her ability to do this thing—it should seem incomprehensible, and yet it feels a natural extension of her own thoughts, a part of her mind, perhaps, that was always there but that she hasn’t turned to before.
She grits her teeth, trembling.
Just as she’s losing her grip on consciousness, Michael calls out to the woman named Bonnie, “Prep a morphine shot!”
The words bring her back to the edge of awareness, but she still feels herself as deadweight, disassociated from her flesh.
“Someone at the store,” Michael’s voice says. “Go ahead and get that shot going.”
There’s a finger at her neck. “She’s alive.” It’s Joel. “Probably dehydrated and starving … multiple dislocations … other internal traumas we have no idea about … you know, the usual! But hey, at least she wasn’t chewing on trees!”
She’s being carried from the vehicle toward a large building. As if peering up at a tiny hole in a high ceiling, she tries to make sense of what’s happening to her and where she is. She senses human souls crowded around her, and their mindscapes are whispering at her under the sharp weight of the pain.
No! Where are they taking me? I can’t be here!
She has to—
Relative darkness envelops her, and then strong hands are settling her to the ground. She tries to move, to escape, but her body won’t respond at all. She reaches out with all her will and finds nothing to latch on to. But then the ground seems to embrace her, and there’s comfort there.
Yes, let me be still, please let me be still.
And then—
A blessed warmth spreads through her limbs and torso and head, fattening her throat but dulling everything, and now Felicia succumbs to unconsciousness quickly, as if yearning for it, and she dives deep and headfirst into blackness.
CHAPTER 6
Felicia is not sure how long she’s out, but as she gradually surfaces toward consciousness, she has endured a nightmare of bustling activity, of thirst and roiling colors, of sucking wounds and crackling tinder. She cries out involuntarily, moving sluggishly atop some crude cardboard pad.
She’s in the center of a musty, claustrophobic room, and through her still-blurred vision she can see the spines of books, desks, colorful though muted posters—Good Readers Are Good Learners!—splashed on the walls, and a black mini-fridge, which is humming to her left. She stares at it in confusion.
There a
re people all around; she can sense them like ghostly blobs in her consciousness, and when she turns her head to face them, they swim into better focus, as if she can geolocate them. Just like the web of souls in her awareness before, when she was …
How …? is her only thought.
Michael is closest, and therefore his mindscape is clearest.
He exudes a complex fear, not only situational but also a larger fear, something about … what? …
—he will be found out—
She stares at that thought, hovering there black and furtive. She can see so much around it, but his personality, his history, is obscured by this shadow. There’s his wife—wait, two wives? Ah yes, the wife who died, what was her name? It’s not there. Susanna is there, his current wife, and there is both love and grief there. She’s dead. How is she dead? Is she infected? No, but she died during the infection—not like the others. How?
He doesn’t know. There’s a conflict there, and it appears like a color in a corner of her own mind.
How is she seeing this?
Impossible!
She also feels Rachel’s strong presence close by, and another in her orbit, a young soul—
—Kayla—
—the two of them facing each other, sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking in soft tones, and the girl is weeping softly and nodding, images of her family large in her mind, especially her mother: kind, generous, smiling. Rachel’s mind is filled with the face of her own mom, distant, dead for years but still powerful, indelible, and this is the topic of their quiet conversation—mothers—and now Felicia senses a strong wave of old sadness thrusting upward inside Rachel’s head. Felicia feels this imagery pass over her like warmth, and she knows it’s informing the conversation between Rachel and Kayla.
Felicia shifts her gaze again and sees others. A group of humans is knotted together beyond Rachel and Kayla, and she catches a jumble of thoughtwaves—
—a man named Bill pondering the fate of his ex-wife, with whom he has been enduring a prolonged and nasty alimony battle, and actively hoping for her demise, and feeling as if he’s won the lottery by remaining alive at the end of the world, and praying to whatever god remains that he can live to have another chance at everything …
—a young woman named Mai, outwardly rebellious but harboring great insecurities and fears inside, and glad she’s with a group rather than alone, like she was for weeks before this shitstorm happened to her, left by an on-and-off-again boyfriend whom she repeatedly fucked over, even she admits that, she can’t help it, and now she has to live with the guilt that she never apologized to him before he ended up sucking on a tree somewhere …
—a young man named Liam, watching Mai’s every move, startlingly unconcerned about his situation as a survivor and what the future holds, wondering how to get into Mai’s pants, he’s the most eligible guy here, right? Might as well take advantage of the situation…
The names and thoughts come at her fiercely, and inside the pain she tries to reconcile her ability to perceive these thoughts with what happened to her at the store. Something was inside her, something took control of her, something with a kind of psychic power—she felt it, she knew it, she remembers it. She doesn’t doubt it. The fact that it happened makes her feel at once violated, as if raped, and altered. Because she has retained this … this clairvoyance, this telepathy.
She turns her head to the right and finds—
—a shifty man named Scott, or maybe it’s his very consciousness that is shifty, his eyes flitting from person to person, scheming, trying to figure out his way out of this, and he understands that none of these people matter except to help him get there, and it would all go away if he could only get to the painkillers in the fridge where they put those fucking bodies, but now someone is always in there with those monsters, especially that busybody Bonnie, and to hell with all of them, he doesn’t need them, does he …?
She pulls away, the thoughts sticking to her like tree sap.
Although the pain wracking Felicia’s body isn’t as severe as it was before, she can still barely stand it. Tears move helplessly down her cheeks, and she can’t keep a stream of whimpers from spilling out of her throat even as the mindscapes shout at her, and she tries twisting her head away from them, but they’re always there, around her—
—a desperately helpful man named Rick, an architect with precise, orderly thoughts, anxious to help the group but dealing with grief, like almost everyone, he understands that, thinking about his fiancé at home, who never woke up this morning, and whom he bolted away from when he saw the crimson glow in her throat, he can’t shake the memory of sprinting out into the street, his heart sledgehammering against his ribcage, unable to control his breath, he will never forget that moment as long as he lives, and he can’t stop wondering where she’s gone, wearing the ring he kneeled to give her only weeks ago …
Felicia squeezes her eyes shut, harder, not wanting to see anymore.
But underneath everything, she still feels the hunger for—
—for the objective—
—what?
The need clutches at her, making her innards tremble and clench.
She’s thrashing her head left and right now, moving her limbs restlessly, trying to escape the dull pain but failing at every angle. She’s also trying to locate something, anything, familiar. Her brows knit with fear.
Then she’s aware that one of the survivors has come close to her, but in the chaos of all of the mindscapes shouting at her, she doesn’t recognize this person.
“You’re okay,” comes a whispered voice. A man.
Her head lolls in his direction.
“I’m Michael,” he says softly.
“I … I ...” she tries, but her mouth won’t work properly. Every word is coming out strangled, as if there’s a great swelling at the back of her throat. She blinks, attempts focus, but he’s too close, and it’s too dark. “Who …?” she manages, but then she sees him huge in her mind’s eye—
—he doesn’t deserve to survive this thing, does he? For God’s sake, he even left all that money lying there, spilling out of the safe for anyone to walk in and find, in the same room as his dead wife. Rachel got her wish, didn’t she? Jesus, he can’t think that way. He ought to tell her, hadn’t he? Take her there when this is all over, and please, please, at least let Rachel survive, his little girl, let her survive this thing. If he can save this woman from the Co-Op, surely he can save his little girl …
The mindscape is chaotic, confusing. But she has a memory of him that stabilizes the jumbled imagery. Memories from the store. This is the man who yanked her from the Co-Op, brought her back to herself. And she realizes now that this is the man she passed on the street earlier, in her car—when? How long ago? How did he find her?
“Are you in pain?”
She tries to form words, but her mouth is in the clutches of a prolonged cramp.
“Can you swallow a pill?”
She nods, whimpers.
“Wait here.”
She manages to turn her head and glance through the open doorway. She squints and tries to comprehend what she sees. Tables of books? Beyond that, a messy checkout area and what appears to be great mounds of tossed-aside tomes. It’s the library. For some reason, she’s in the downtown library, and it appears to have been ransacked. The survivors’ thoughts pull at her.
—a sweaty man named Brian, his perspiration mirroring his internal distress, knowing he’s without his heart medication but too proud to inform the others, fueled by stuttering adrenaline, certain he’s not getting out of this alive but anxious to help while he can, as long as he doesn’t overdo it, and gnawing on the memory, almost constantly, of his grown son who lives in Loveland but whom he hasn’t spoken to in eight years, and he desperately wonders what has become of him and his granddaughter …
She searches for information inside these mindscapes.
Little pieces of memory, little jags of perception, from all of them.
—monsters—
—have to get through this, and then—
—she’ll keep me safe, she will, she promised—
—will anything be the same, ever? I mean, how can this be happening? What’s next?—
Swallowing a black knot of pain, she collects the thoughts and tries to make sense of them. Then she wonders, How come I’m not at the hospital? I need help. Serious help.
In a moment, Michael is helping her swallow six pain pills. She does her best to help him, reaching up one shaking arm, but her shoulder grinds in its socket again, and more quiet sobs escape her. The pain is literally blinding.
“Let me know if that doesn’t help.”
“Huuuurts,” she mouths. “F—feels wr—wro—wrong.”
“What feels wrong?”
She brings up a wobbly hand and touches her head, grits her teeth.
“You’ve been through a lot,” Michael says. “Just keep as still as you can, let yourself heal.”
She looks at him, imploring. “Wh … what h—h—h—”
There’s a pause. “You’ve had an accident.”
Amid the chaos of her senses, Felicia tries to focus her own thoughts. Her consciousness remains scattershot, but her memory is there. It’s in splinters, but it’s there. Her inadvertent incarceration in Janet’s office feels like a shivery nightmare, but she knows it was real. Somehow, it was real. It happened. She was overtaken by something—controlled by a living presence—and it gradually gained control of her body, for some reason tearing her bones from their sockets, bending her backward as if she was a child’s plaything. She knows these things because she can still sense the presence that was inside her. Something was living inside her! She can visualize the echo of its thoughts. The things that it tried to communicate to her, the impulses it wanted her to act on. No, that’s not it. The things that it communicated to the web of souls that she was part of.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 5
