—Kayla on the edge of shock, ready to fall into a nightmare sleep in childlike withdrawal from the horrors, her mind frantic with recent jags of imagery, and trying to shut them out by conjuring the face of her mother …
The images fading as the truck draws away.
—Rachel experiencing similar flittering images, jerking away from them, comforting the girl, it’s all about keeping the girl strong, even as Daddy is gone, Daddy is gone, how can he be—
Their thoughts silencing with more distance.
—and one last glimpse of Kevin’s blunt thoughts as he begins to navigate the vehicle, watching the dash indicators, not letting the horrors and implications of the library attack distract him from his current purpose, thinking and not thinking of Michael and what he did, my god, this girl lost her fath—
And gone.
The truck disappears from sight, and Felicia finds that she can’t move. The cries and screams of the dying and maimed bombard her head, but that’s only the beginning. If she directs her thoughts, she can discern each individual person’s stream of consciousness, and every one of them is a study in confusion and agony. The scale is bewildering.
Her human instinct is to fall to the ground, curl into a ball, and wrap her arms around her head, but she’s compelled to let all of the voices in. She feels the stain of her infection, a heat in the center of her head, and satisfying that heat requires that she absorb everything. As if these mindsets are part of her.
How is she seeing these things?
Beyond the horrific sights and sounds around her, it’s the question that has absorbed her pain-wracked existence since she regained her humanity. She knows she is in the process of shedding her infection, much like a snake skin—she can feel the sticky residue of it, the organic warmth, it’s still a part of her, but bits of it are falling away. Other parts of this thing that happened to her—they’ve remained very much a part of her, but they are changing, right along with the humanity that is seeping back. Almost as if it’s altering her DNA, as if she can feel the strands twisting in new ways, in new directions. At times she imagines this new twist as some kind of instant evolution of her psychology. At other times … a mutation.
Her perspective keeps changing in that respect.
She has strong, tactile memories of her thoughts under infection. The way her thoughts threaded with those of the former humans in her vicinity. One of those had been Janet. Her mind melding with that of her boss, but in a way that ignored the soul that had previously inhabited the body. They had shared the same objective, and it was an all-consuming image of the nutrient, the chemical abnormality, the cellular aberration in the trees. They had also shared the consciousness of whatever it was that inhabited them, but at a remove. Ghost images, hard-wired and low. Insectile, clicking, tendril-wrapped.
When humanity had returned, she’d cried out not only in physical agony but also in inner tumult, losing—for the most part—that soul-deep connection with the rest of the inhabited. Although that sensation is reluctantly and slowly fading, she knows the experience of it will stay with her forever.
And in fact it is staying with her—and mutating into something else.
Her mind has been forever altered.
Synapses have fired along new neural pathways, and a new ability has manifested itself in a previously unused corner of her consciousness.
She can see inside not only the minds of the infected, but also the minds of the survivors.
Right now, however, she’s surrounded by the agony of infected souls who have, like her, returned to humanity. She sighs, stands tall, lets her arms drift back, away from her body. Her head falls to her chest, and she lets the web of souls entangle her, not resisting. The voices coalesce into a screaming entreaty, and she pushes out, tentatively, with the intent to heal.
The screams subside dramatically, for only a moment, and then they slowly rise to their former strength, perhaps louder.
Felicia doesn’t know what to do, how to help—or even if she should. She feels caught between two worlds.
The dazed survivors move in fits and starts, not knowing how to react to the deaths that have befallen them. Most of them are in the vicinity of Bonnie’s body, in the south hall. A mere half hour ago, Felicia sensed the woman’s lifeforce snuffed out, shortly before the end, before Michael leaped into the abyss toward his own demise. Felicia can feel the survivors’ collective consciousness desperately trying to makes sense of the loss.
—oh no!—
—fucking Christ—
—not Bonnie! —
—oh my God—
And Scott on the periphery, burning brightly with high emotion, chewing the flesh on the inside of his cheeks, staring, but away from the bodies, any of the bodies, his mind aflame, refusing to accept this outcome—
—she didn’t do that for me, she shouldn’t have done that, impossible, it was an accident, a horrible accident, I didn’t cause this, this isn’t my fault, I didn’t do that to her, she did that herself—
Before long, they’re moving Bonnie’s body, reverently, to a quiet corner, covering it with a brown blanket found upstairs in the staff area. Felicia doesn’t know how she knows that without seeing them do it, but the knowledge is there. The sounds of despair—particularly from the young woman, for whom Bonnie had quickly become a mother figure—mingle with the agony of the turned bodies, which number in the hundreds. A number that is falling as, one by one, they succumb to their injuries. Even after the pain of the bloodchange, the return to humanity, they’re dealing with much worse physical damage than she herself experienced locked in the storeroom. Much worse. In many cases, the wounds are horrific enough that death is inevitable.
The turned bodies see her, just as they recognized her at the end of the assault. They watched her with fear—she felt that. What is the emotion with which they’re watching her now?
She senses souls winking out in her vicinity, and she’s frozen in not only indecision but in pain. Her body is still rigid with it, despite the dwindling supply of pain relievers. All she can do is stand there, bombarded.
Joel and Ron are behind her then, raiding supplies, seeing where they stand after the assault. She feels Joel’s eyes on her back, senses him studying her.
“How long will they take?” It’s Ron’s voice, and the young man’s mind is filled with a shaky determination.
“You know where the hospital is, right? It’s only about ten minutes away, and the streets are clear. Shouldn’t take long.”
“Is it a good idea, sending them out there? Letting that girl go?”
“Now’s the right time. Those things aren’t paying attention. And Rachel can take care of herself. I hope. And that kid, too.”
“They’re armed?”
“Yes.”
“Not much left here,” Ron says, opening the mini fridge. “In fact, pretty much nothing. I hope they’re quick and nothing happens.”
“Bring what we’ve got, let’s do what we can. Get stuff to the girls.”
“Roger that.”
“Treatable inside, untreatable outside.”
“Makes sense.”
“We take and hour or two to treat who we can, and then we get the hell out of here before nightfall.”
“Leave?” Ron radiates alarm like heat.
“This place is fucked—I mean, come on, you seriously want to stay here now? Look around. It’s a warzone, and completely indefensible.”
“We beat ’em here, we held ’em back.”
“If they try again, we won’t have the same luck.”
A pause, then Ron says, “You’re probably right.”
They’re on their way back out into the lobby area.
“We can bring Brian in here,” Ron says.
At the mention of the man’s name, Felicia searches, searches, and finds Brian in the south hall, on his back, Rick doing chest compressions and Bill checking the man’s sweaty neck for a pulse. She can even sense Brian’s mind—
&nbs
p; —jags of memory in nightmare flashes, bodies squeezing through gaps, gasping, and flitting further out to include his estranged son, anger there, vague, shouting, and damn if there isn’t a bright light, something physiological, something inner rather than outer, resonating and rising from within, and the glimpse of it—
—shocks Felicia out of Brian’s mind, as if the light yanked at her, pulled at her innards. She knows that Brian is not going to survive.
Joel is directly in front of her, staring at her.
“You with us?” he barks.
“I’m … here.”
“Can you help?”
“I … can try.”
“How do you feel?”
She swallows, watching his eyes. They’re like lasers boring into her. Behind those eyes, his methodical cop mind is thinking three steps ahead, like a hard-trained chess player, visualizing the layout of the library, anticipating where the rest of the survivors are, gauging the remaining threat and what kind of defensive tactics are available to them, as well as how much time they have. He has so much poise. He’s strategizing about obtaining more weapons and going on the offensive now that the survivors seem to have the advantage. She wonders if he knows how they obtained that advantage. Does he believe that matters?
“I—I think the worst of it is over. It hurts, but I can manage it.”
“Come on then.”
She follows him out of the room and into the lobby.
Although she felt the turmoil occurring from the other room, she’s stunned by what she sees. Bodies everywhere, most destroyed by rifle fire but many turned back to humanity by blood, tranq darts still lodged in their flesh, their screams adding up to an agonized roar. As they sense Felicia approaching, a relative hush fills the room, and the survivors pause in their frantic movements to determine its cause. They end up eyeing Felicia as she passes among them, just as many of those who have been turned back watch her with straining eyes before they resume their cries. Then everyone is in motion again.
“Girls, can you use Felicia?” Joel calls to the twins, Chloe and Zoe.
“Yeah, yeah!”
The young women are sweaty, bloody, shell-shocked, but they’re absorbed in their task: looking for turned bodies that might have a chance at surviving. In the immediate aftermath of the assault—as the infected bodies began to retreat—these two went into emergency medical mode, searching for those they might coax fully back to humanity.
Joel goes off to his next task, and Felicia is left facing Zoe, who looks at her with wariness and exhaustion. Behind her red-rimmed eyes lies a controlled chaos—she’s taking each moment as it happens.
“We’re bringing bodies here, along this wall, see? You don’t have to worry about that part, but when we bring them in, can you help us search the bodies for any bleeding wounds we missed? Use the towels there. Over there. That’s all we have, so give pressure to what you can …”
Felicia nods. “Okay.”
Then Zoe is gone, leaving a trail of jagging stress-thoughts and the sweet-sour odor of drying blood and body odor. Felicia sees Chloe out in the hot afternoon sun, sifting through the bodies, stopping at the ones that still move. Just as Felicia turns back to the small collection of bodies to the left of the checkout area, Ron whisks past, his mind seeking Liam.
Felicia closes her eyes, trying to find herself amid the commotion. She feels her body easing to the ground, her knees touch carpet, and she bears the brunt of human and alien voices battering her consciousness. What does she remember? She needs to focus on something.
Nicole!
What happened to her? Where is she? She experiences an alarming moment when she can’t conjure her lover’s face, or the sound of her voice, and she begins to shake. The voices threaten to overtake her mind, but she pushes them out and grabs at Nicole’s memory—
—of lying next to her staring at the ceiling, touching here and there, talking about whatever, reminiscing about very different childhoods, laughing, singing off-key, listening to the oscillating fan sweep the room, trying on each other’s clothes, dreaming of travel, the future, the future—
“Here’s one!”
A new body drops next to her, a young boy to add to the several men and middle-aged women already here. His high voice is screeching like an animal squawk, and when he settles into place, he stops his braying noise, staring up into her face. He feels his inner exclamation—
You!
Caught between human and alien, caught between fear and gratitude. Then, as with the others, the pain clouds everything, and he’s screaming again. But his mindset is there, anchored. His name is Perry. His strongest thought is of his dad—
—waiting that morning before the sun came up, because they were supposed to get up early and go fishing at the pond north of the city, their favorite fishing hole. He had his new, bigger tackle box ready, and all his worms writhing in the bucket, and he even got up before dawn all on his own, he was so excited. And every once in a while he poked his head into his parents’ room and listened to his dad snore, waiting for the sun to rise, and when the sky began to brighten he did shake his dad’s shoulder, and his dad stirred and grunted, and then—
Red.
Felicia looks down into the boy’s pleading eyes. Can she help him? She feels him fading. The twins might not have seen it, because his limbs appear to be intact. His youth makes him appear more viable. But she knows he is close to death. His expression is wet with bloody tears, and he opens his mouth as if to speak, and that’s when Felicia sees that his lips are torn, his teeth shredded from his mouth, his tongue a writhing stump. His throat is choked with pulpy, gargling blood. Pale and delirious, he faints away and succumbs.
She yanks herself from him, openly crying. Summoning strength to work past the pain of movement, she lifts him up and carries him outside to the growing line of corpses.
There are piles of struggling bodies outside, mostly crammed against the library’s exterior walls, and she tries to close her mind to their pleas. Once afraid of her, they now see her as salvation. Why? What can she do for them? They grab at her in a final effort to cling to life—they grab with their dislocated limbs with their minds, reaching out psychically as part of the torn web of souls, tugging at her.
Felicia staggers, squinting. She hasn’t been outside in days. The library grounds are sun-baked, sweltering. To her right, Joel and Ron are working at something inside a truck, and it takes only a moment for Felicia to understand that they’re wrestling with a large body. The dead man is Jeff Thompson—a travesty of broken flesh. In a flash, Felicia can see what happened to him, the malicious bodies shoving their way through the cab on their way to the library doors and windows, crushing him, stabbing at him.
Jeff’s twin brother Pete is standing at a distance, both watching and not watching. He’s twitching with grief and anger while Joel and Ron move the body solemnly, talking strategy. Felicia can sense they’re about to leave. They intend to determine whether the truck is drivable so that they can gather arms from the SWAT truck at the police station.
To her left, Chloe screams, “Here! Here!”
Rick goes zipping past her to help.
Felicia feels dizzy. She turns slowly back to the library, overwhelmed by the voices crashing into her. She needs to focus them, deal with them individually, and help however she can.
Just as she re-enters through the doors, she catches sight of Mai in the north hallway, beyond the book-returns area. Mai freezes as if caught committing a crime. Felicia stops, meets her gaze. Mai’s mind opens to her effortlessly, almost like a scent, a hot odor singeing in Felicia’s sinus cavity—
—could leave through that window and nobody would notice, could jet around the corner and be gone, grab a car and get the fuck out of here, shoulda done that from the start, and why the hell is she staring at me, freaky bitch, what are you looking at? And anyway, fuck her, I can sneak away and no one’s the wiser, I can make it on my own, those things are on the run, I can go home, get
my shit, and drive east, see what I find, there’s no trees out that way, they don’t want anything out there, maybe I’ll find more people alive, sensible people who aren’t into barricading themselves in a place that has a thousand giant windows, for fuck’s sake—
As Mai is about to turn away, Felicia gestures toward her, catching her attention. Mai pauses, watches her curiously.
Felicia shakes her head—
No. Don’t go.
—and pushes out with her consciousness, stirring Mai’s mindscape.
Mai stares, opens her mouth, then closes it. She disappears from view.
Felicia isn’t entirely sure what she’s done. Mai’s personality is so strong that her thoughts appeared vivid and urgent to her. Or perhaps it was only proximity and focus. Felicia swallows hard, painfully, as she turns back to the bodies at the checkout area.
Chloe brings in another one, a teenaged female, naked, broken.
“See if you can help her,” Chloe says. “I don’t see much bleeding on this one. Check her mouth.” She sets the body down carefully on the carpet, but the girl cries out harshly.
Felicia nods at Chloe, already focusing, and Chloe rushes away, out the door.
The girl’s name is Abby, she can discern that as if it’s written across her flesh in blood. Abby’s mind latches on to Felicia’s, smoothly though desperately, in confusion—there’s an awareness that they’re both still attuned to the strangers’ web of souls, that they’ve retained this vital thing, and they’re unsure how to use it as humans. They communicate this awareness in a mere sliver of a moment.
Abby shares something in common with the other three bodies lying in a row along this wall. Felicia looks down the row. A young man named Jake, staring at her with wet eyes, his hot breath moving quickly in hyperventilation, his face hastily bandaged. A girl called Sofia, eyes tightly closed, dealing with her pain. A boy named Oliver, also watching her, his mouth open, sap and splinters smeared across his forehead, his unruly hair stiffened into bloody stalagmites.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 11
