“Scott,” Rachel says, “you need to put pressure on that wound. Hang tight.”
She guides his hands to the wound as he nods his weary head.
Felicia’s hands push supplies through the small rear window, and Kayla takes them eagerly, unwrapping them. Rachel keeps one eye on the rear of the Hummer, motoring south past Drake, and another on Kayla, who readies a large white bandage.
“Use the paper towels to dry the area as best you can, then put that on him, and wrap those long bandages around him. He’ll need to lean forward.”
“I can do this.”
“’Course you can.”
As Kayla busies herself with cleaning the wound, Rachel watches the road and occasionally glances at the rearview, catching glimpses of Felicia, who attends to the women and boy as if nothing special happened on the street moments ago.
Rachel keeps close to Joel’s bumper, tailgating him, still believing innately that Felicia’s influence—as well as the others’—is strongest with proximity. She envisions it as both a protective and healing shield. Whatever Felicia managed to do moments ago, that shield appears to be growing, possibly because of the number of turned bodies they have accumulated, possibly more because of Felicia’s growing strength, but either way, Rachel remains glued to the Hummer’s rear.
Darkened rows of homes and entrances to quiet neighborhoods drift past. She knows exactly where they are—she has many memories of traveling these roads—but her mind is still back there at the Safeway grocery store, where she and her mom would go for bakery items on some Sundays, so long ago now. A different life.
Her mind goes fuzzy again. She could easily doze, right here behind the wheel. It’s been too long since she’s slept. Her eye sockets feel hollowed out.
It’s too easy to let her mind drift into memory, when she would go to that store with her mom as the effects of the disease (and treatment) became pronounced. Her mom had taken to hiding her balding scalp with a pretty blue scarf that she and her dad had picked out together, but it couldn’t hide the gaunt, etched face that cancer and chemotherapy had conspired to inflict on her. Rachel remembers that face more from photos now than from actual memory, but the recollection is bloated with grief. The pity radiating from the bakery personnel, the sorrowful apologies that such an awful ordeal had befallen her, the sighs that accompanied the goodbyes. Rachel has a strong image of their bagged items between them in the car, a grease mark on the side, as her mom drove them home silently, with wet eyes.
She startles out of the memory, jerks the truck back into her lane, glances over at Scott. Kayla has managed to place the bandage fairly neatly over Scott’s wound and is in the process of wrapping his midsection with long strips of gauze, applying pressure to the entire area. Scott has leaned forward and is in the midst of a prolonged wheeze. His face is locked in a determined grimace.
“Doin’ good,” Rachel says, and he manages a nod.
His eyes keep drifting closed, as if he’s about to lose consciousness. She needs to keep him awake.
“Who did you lose, Scott?”
His eyes open, and he turns to her, halfway frowning. He swallows, looks away, then back again. “My folks.” He winces. “They lived in town. We weren’t close.” He goes quiet for a while, and Rachel glances over at him to see him concentrating better. “Still, it was the first place I went when I woke up. They have a little house over on Mountain. You know the story: No answer at their door, and I found them in their bed. Unresponsive.” He grits his teeth. “And yet something was happening inside them. I could see it right away.”
Ahead of them, Joel takes a tight arc around a ghostly collision, and Rachel follows as closely as she can. She doesn’t want to ram the Hummer for fear of messing with this old truck’s antique engine.
“I panicked, didn’t know what to do,” Scott goes on. “Eventually I ended up at the hospital. Home turf. I wanted to help. I really did.” He glances down at his side, places his restless hands on his thighs, then looks away, out the window. “I have no idea where my folks have ended up. I’m sure they’re gone. My dad was an asshole anyway.” His voice is matter-of-fact.
Rachel looks over at him, doesn’t know if she should give voice to the first thing she thinks.
Scott catches the look in her eye. “Hard to believe, I know.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Yeah you were.”
She can’t help it—she’s thinking of her own dad. The image of his slack face flashes at her, twice, hard, but she won’t let it take hold of her consciousness. That’s for later. No, she’s thinking of him alive. Of everything he had to apologize for. She thinks of her mother and of Susanna, and how awful all that was. Her dad made mistakes, of course, but he was never an asshole—even though she’d shouted that very word in his presence on more than one occasion. Yes, they had their share of screaming arguments, in which she did all the screaming. She’d been the asshole the whole time.
That was the subject matter of her life only last week, and now it means next to nothing. Regret starts to flow through her veins like ice water.
She’s about to cry, so she changes the subject.
“What about your mom?”
Scott’s expression says he’s done talking, but when he looks into her eyes, he softens. “She was so peaceful there in the bed. Like I could wake her up and everything would be fine. She put up with so much shit. So much shit. She didn’t have a good life. But in the end, she was at peace. I’m sure of it.” He focuses on the road coming at them, searching, then pauses. “That’s gonna stay with me. Finding her like that.”
Rachel nods.
Scott is wide awake now, chewing his lip. “I see what you’re doing, you know.”
Rachel half-smiles.
“Nice work,” he says, wincing again.
Rachel looks behind her, through the window, shining the mag light back there. The older woman, Julia, is sitting up against the rear gate, staring at her. She appears vastly improved—a good sign. Her eyes are haunted, and her mouth opens and closes, as if testing an injury to the throat. Felicia did the same thing in the library, Rachel remembers, but it took her longer to become so aware. Linda, the younger woman, is writhing in agony still, her teeth gritted despite morphine, her eyes flooded with moisture, dealing with her transformation. As for the boy, Philip, he is mostly blocked from Rachel’s view, but she glimpses a small, pajama-clad leg. She can make out a morphine mewl coming from his poor mouth, down and to her right, and her own jaw clenches in response. She can’t even imagine the pain.
At least they’re human again, she thinks.
However, she can’t help but acknowledge that large piece of her that is looking down on these rather pitiful human beings—these almost mortally injured survivors, these hobbled wounded—and feeling futility. Does Joel really think these people can make a difference? Felicia has proven that she has some kind of power over the monsters, yes, and even Rachel feels the snap of hope when she considers what the woman can do, and has done, but there are obviously strong limits to that power.
Just as she’s swinging her head back to the road, Felicia’s head jolts to attention.
“Wait!” she says. “Wait!”
Rachel checks her distance from the Hummer, then looks back again.
“What, do you see something?”
A kind of nervous passion takes hold of Felicia’s features, and she searches the distance to the southwest, her eyes squinting.
“Nicole,” Felicia whispers.
“What?” Rachel says. “Who?”
“I see her,” Felicia says softly. “I see them. All of them.”
Whatever color that remained in the woman’s cheeks has drained away with the mention of that name. Nicole. Rachel’s mind somersaults.
“Who’s Nicole?”
Felicia keeps staring west. “She’s up there, she’s with them. Oh my God, they’re all there.”
“But who—”
And as Rachel contin
ues to shoot glances back at Felicia, she watches the woman’s face gradually turn from passion to unease to cold calculation. Rachel isn’t sure if it’s the glow of the Hummer’s tail lights or whatever remains inside Felicia, but a crimson luminescence is still throbbing in the poor young woman’s slack mouth. More than ever since leaving the library, Felicia’s allegiance appears mysterious. Rachel decides to keep this thought to herself, but she feels a real anxiety that Felicia might not be the hopeful turned-back beacon that the survivors all hope she is. Either way, Felicia has been forever changed by her ordeal, and it’s heartbreaking to watch her expression shift from hope to desolate cunning—whatever the cause. But more than ever, it feels like a leap of faith to trust in her as they approach the alien epicenter.
After passing more silent, darkened homes, tailgating Joel, she glances back again to find Felicia’s gaze still locked on whatever she senses to the southwest.
“Thanks Kayla,” comes Scott’s struggling voice.
Kayla has been helping him with his bandage, making sure he keeps it tight against his side. His face is sweaty and pale.
He and Rachel share a glance as Kayla settles back into her seat.
“I know you would never worry about me,” he says, managing a thin smile, “but don’t worry about me.”
“You’re gonna get through this.”
“Huh,” he mumbles.
“What?”
“You’ve never lied to me before now.”
“Oh, knock it off.”
The night comes at her relentlessly. Joel keeps tapping his brakes, driving cautiously through the mostly empty streets, and Rachel begins to feel impatient. Scott is dying next to her in his seat, and Felicia is suddenly hyper-aware of the survivors’ destination. But there’s more to it than that, Rachel understands. She feels as if she’s sensing some kind of collective need to get this done. And her instincts are telling her that this feeling is coming from the survivors lying in the rear of the truck. There’s a sense of readiness, despite their pain and suffering.
The readiness mirrors her own.
Rachel taps the truck’s horn once, twice, and the Hummer brakes to a stop in the middle of the road. Rachel guesses they’re coming up on Horsetooth Road now. All around them are quiet homes, and she senses no movement anywhere. Rachel pulls up next to Joel and leans out the window to peer up at him.
His window is down, and his head is already hanging out. “What now?”
“Felicia is on to something.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s sensing something.”
“Sensing something?”
“I think she can take us directly where we need to go.”
Joel glances back in Felicia’s direction, although the woman has dropped out of sight into the flatbed. Rachel sees doubt in his eyes, and he gives voice to them.
“This whole party’s over if she has the wrong motives,” Joel says, echoing her own thoughts.
“She doesn’t.”
“You sure?”
“You were the one banking on her earlier, right?”
Joel doesn’t answer.
“You up for following a girl who can barely drive stick?” Rachel asks him.
Joel turns to the twins next to him, and Rachel leans over to see them, too. They glance over at her miserably as Joel asks them, “Any objections?”
The twins shake their heads.
“Get on out there, girl,” he says, nodding forward. “A former corpse with a sixth sense is good enough for me.”
She nods, then wrangles the truck into first gear, turning to Kayla and Scott. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 23
Felicia senses Nicole like a vague, pulsing dot in a live satellite image, red and quivering in her western periphery, but alive and there. Amidst the chaos of the other souls—that’s how she has come to think of them—she feels the pull of Nicole like gravity. Only a moment later does Felicia grasp the impossibility of actually arriving in front of her, of facing her, of getting to her through the throngs of infected bodies. Of even having the opportunity to bring her back.
Rachel works the gearshift into first. Felicia catches a hint of the urgency of the young woman’s mind, coupled with the edgy exhaustion they all feel.
Rachel lurches the truck forward, swinging the giant yellow monstrosity around in front of them. “Let’s go,” she says inside the cab.
Felicia’s body jerks with the sudden movement, but all this is happening mostly in her background, as her focus is on the west. She can’t help but turn her head that way. Her lover is really out there, not dead, still a part of this nightmare reality, a bright spot amid the churning, alien mass that has occupied her violated brain for the past few days.
Now, she can’t even focus on the two women and the boy, who are in varying stages of their return. She is in the midst of caring for them, feels deep sympathy for their plight, and now she can’t focus on them. She can’t turn away from this.
Since she herself returned at the hands of Joel and Michael at the Co-Op, her mind has been inundated by the presence of the web of souls. She has wisps of memory of her time under the sway of the strangers—that’s the word that occurred to her first, the moment she turned—but they feel more like the remnants of a nightmare than a lived experience. Even so, inside those wisps of memory is the sense that she had her place in that web. Upon leaving it, she felt an overwhelming loss. Like a soul ripped from its host, leaving her with only the gasping memory of the host’s warmth. She has the perspective to see that now.
But even as she experienced the loss, and regained her humanity, she realized that she had also gained something.
Something stayed with her.
Awareness.
Though she’s no longer part of the web of souls, she can see it. And she can sense each individual soul. And not only those souls. Every soul.
Not many of her thoughts over the past few tumultuous days have dwelled on Nicole and her whereabouts, but now she has rushed to the front of Felicia’s brain. When the truck takes the turn on Harmony heading west, Nicole becomes an even brighter spot in her mind’s eye, as if acknowledging the fact that Felicia has seen her.
Felicia blinks and turns. The two women and the boy are in three separate stages of healing. Julia, the woman from the Volkswagen bus near the library, has come a long way from when they first found her near death in that cramped, furnace-like vehicle. She has no doubt that Julia would have perished in that car days ago were it not for the infestation. The strangers’ presence turned her body into a nearly invulnerable host, replacing the supremacy of its fragile animal systems with a kind of energy new to the human species. It’s an energy that Felicia understands instinctively, having been under its sway, but she has struggled to find words to describe it.
The truth is, it scares her.
Ever since Michael brought her back, she has been in fear of what she’s gone through. She still doesn’t understand what the infestation did to her—and what it is still doing to her.
When she looks at Julia, through eyes that have been irreparably damaged, she sees herself as she was two days ago: blind, enduring unutterable pain, and in the midst of psychic mayhem. Felicia feels as if she’s still in the grip of the latter, but at least she knows now that she has become human again. In the early hours, she wasn’t even sure of her allegiance.
And that’s what scares her the most.
She doesn’t want to admit it to herself, let alone Rachel and the others, but she feels as if she might—she could—change back at any moment. That’s how powerful the infestation was.
It makes her shudder every time she thinks about it.
She can feel the presence of the strangers in her mind, ready to grab at her, ready to rip her apart, and yet so far she has been able to keep that presence at bay. But oh, the retribution in store for her if it becomes known to the strangers what she is doing.
Julia was only the first.
The other
woman, Linda, is younger, darker, still in the early throes. Felicia and the twins have pumped her full of morphine twice since rescuing her earlier in the night, but she’s still the equivalent of a trapped animal, jerking and grunting. Felicia secured her in a blanket near the right wheel well after the twins helped her set two dislocated limbs, but Felicia can do little for her internal injuries except for pain relief. It was the same with her, at the library.
Since snatching her from the back seat of her vehicle, Linda has been weeping inconsolably—probably not even understanding why. Felicia has been soothing her as well as she can. Sympathy blooms inside her as she has never before felt.
The little boy is another matter. Even when Felicia first sensed Philip, she knew there was something different about him. When he turned back to humanity, he peered straight into her eyes, and she beheld the crimson within them, and she knew that he saw it in her, and somehow they were one. They fed off each other.
He didn’t even express very much pain in the turn. He screamed, to be sure, and he needed pain relief, but his protestations amounted to little more than typical toddler pain. He bounced back more quickly. Indeed, he was already the furthest evolved of all three of the bodies they’d saved. When she looks at him now, she sees an abused little boy, yes, but he’s resting, healing, conserving energy. She can sense his resilience and vitality like warmth against her skin. She can also sense that, like the rest of them in the rear of the truck, he has retained the crimson stain.
She’s sure that this boy, this Philip, means something—far beyond what his size suggests. And she knows, deep down, that he has fueled something inside her. She feels stronger, more alive. And she feels a new power inside her.
“They’re doing well,” she says when Rachel repeats her question.
“Do you think it’s working?” Rachel shouts through the window. “This whole thing—do you think it’s working?”
Felicia hangs on to the left side wall, turning into the warm breeze, toward Nicole.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 25
