“I do,” she says simply.
Gauging the red pulse off in the distance, she feels a connection to her former humanity. She has felt an inkling with Michael and Rachel—her former customers at the Co-Op—but now the feeling has burst forth with the recognition that Nicole is still alive in the world. She’s out there, she’s close, and Felicia is going toward her. She holds out little hope that she can save her, but at least she will see her again. Her love. Her life. It remains.
Rachel nods, then turns her attention back to Kayla and Scott, helping the girl with something as she continues to follow Joel in the Hummer.
Felicia knows Rachel’s mindscape. The young woman has been through her share of pain. Felicia senses great loss—the memories of her mother are wrapped in melancholy gauze, beautiful and bitter at the same time. She gathers that the loss preceded the apocalyptic event by a number of years, but the emotion surrounding it remains strong. Rachel has also watched friends die, recently, and even helplessly. And of course her father, Michael, who sacrificed himself for her.
Yet despite his sacrifice, there is mystery surrounding him—
Oh Daddy!
—inside the young woman’s mind. Rachel has discovered something about her father, and she is full of questions. Doubts. Fears. Something to do with money. Secrets. And it’s causing Rachel pain. Pain she knows she’ll have to deal with. Felicia wishes she could help her, but she doesn’t know anything about their relationship. It’s not her place.
She doesn’t even know how to broach the subject. Or even how to suggest that she has this new, impossible ability. She has admitted to Rachel that she can sense other infected bodies—their locations, even the state of their minds—but she has stopped short of telling her that the ability extends beyond the infected.
She feels the exhausted strength of Joel, who is fueled largely by adrenaline now and increasingly frightened about the end game—though he would never admit to that fear. She gets a strong sense of young Kayla’s bright, goggle-eyed, innocent terror, tempered by her immediate attachment and even love for Rachel. Felicia has spent time with the resourceful twins, and even though she couldn’t help them as much as she would have wanted, she knows the pain they both feel, in almost precisely equal measures, for their lost parents and friends. And she has seen inside Scott’s insecure mind, has pondered the way it has veered from darkness to light, then back again. She knows his pain, and she understands the severity of his wound—can even feel it, a phantom stab in her own side when she focuses on him.
This ability, too, scares her.
Makes her feel … alien.
Nicole pulls at her, and she knows they’re traveling in the right direction, and her heart fills with dark hope.
Face thrust forward into the wind, she closes her eyes and lets Nicole’s soul work on her, tug at her. It’s like falling sideways. For a moment, she manages to ignore the pain that still wrenches at her throat and her sinuses, ignores the throbbing soreness in all of her limbs and in her spine, and focuses on her lover—her face, her voice whispering to her to hurry, please hurry, even as Felicia knows she’s supplying these words herself.
After only a few seconds, her attention is snatched to her right.
Three bodies are galloping fluidly across a greenbelt adjacent to the road, chasing them from afar. Felicia sensed their proximity as her vision became aware of them peripherally. Before she calls out to the others, she watches them. Their movements are almost graceful. There’s a beauty there. She recognizes their beauty. How can she think that way?
Look at them! How they have evolved in so short a time!
It’s all part of the objective.
As she watches them, she can’t help but recall her own infestation. The details are foggy, but the hammering horror of that time resonates still. The cracking limbs, the straining, the immediate possession at her center—overwhelming! But even as she coped with the reality that she was trapped in the Co-Op office, she heard the whispers into her subconscious, the soothing voice—not in her tongue but understandable all the same—that calmed her and ensured her that the pain would ease and that adaptation would come.
Gazing at the sprinting bodies, she realizes that adaptation has been almost fully realized in them. This is what she would have become had Michael not changed her back. These bodies are no longer human. They are strangers in the flesh. She still has flash-imprints of the strangers in their own form, on their own world, and this is what they look like.
Nightmares in the flesh.
“Rachel!” she calls, trying to put strength into her still-broken voice.
“Yeah?” comes Rachel’s voice over the rumble of the truck’s motor.
“We’re being followed.”
“Where?”
“To the right.”
Rachel searches out the passenger window. “I don’t see anything.”
“They’re there.”
“Are they getting close?” Rachel shouts through the window. “As close as before?”
Felicia is watching the charging bodies carefully, caught between mesmerized and fearful. The bodies are dashing fluidly over sidewalks and grass islands, leaping from asphalt to cement curbs, and their heads are swiveling as if tracking the vehicles. Or are they watching her?
As she has recaptured more and more of her humanity, Felicia has felt her consciousness turning outward, following a period of weird self-awareness of herself as other. She remembers feeling a truly vicious anger, an incomprehensible rage and failure, and it took her a long time to recapture herself as a human. It took days. The knowledge of that confuses and embarrasses her.
She sensed some of that in the human beings here with her in the truck bed, when they too turned—at her hand!—but it’s fading with time. Fading along with the healing. And they are turning back to humanity faster than she did. Michael turned her with blood, but she turned these humans back with the force of whatever lingered inside her. That, too, distresses Felicia—whatever remains.
She can also sense the minds of these galloping bodies, albeit in a more distant way. The objective is clear in their minds—a singular, gleaming purpose—but these three are among the many dispatched to face those who survived.
She focuses hard on the lead body, feeling its urgency, its single-mindedness. It’s so powerful. And the one thing she doesn’t sense there is the knowledge that it can, at any time, detonate the orb of energy at the center of its skull. It is not in control of that. Its objective, divorced from the overall objective of the web of souls, is to get as close as possible to the targets—and then something else—
—the strangers—
—is pulling the trigger, exploding the orb in desperation. In anger.
She hasn’t been able to see those coming.
And she knows they will keep coming until the unexpected threat is eliminated. But Felicia can sense the uncertainty. It’s the same uncertainty that first gripped them at the library when Michael thrust himself into the horde, when Felicia herself rose from the floor and faced the wall of corpses.
“Felicia?” Rachel shouts again.
“They’re keeping their distance,” she says. “They’re more afraid than ever.”
“What?” Rachel calls, not quite hearing her.
“They’re afraid.”
“They’re afraid of you?”
“Yes.”
The word catches in Felicia’s ravaged throat, making her cough. She winces with pain. She has been medicating herself since she turned, and has been trying to ingest less and less pain relief with time, but she has never felt such unrelenting pain in her life—as if she has swallowed fire, as if the center of her head has been burned out, as if all her muscles have been whip-snapped.
But it’s that thought that nearly does her in.
Me. They’re afraid of me.
She has suspected something incomprehensible happening inside her since she turned Julia in the back of that Volkswagen bus. Something simultaneou
sly pushed and pulled at her as she approached that bus. For whatever reason, she resisted the thing pulling at her and instead went to the woman—the force that pushed at her. The woman with the long gray hair had seemed a corpse, but her soul all but shouted at this kindred soul, begged her to help her. The thing pulling at her no longer had sway over her. It no longer had its vice-like grip over her own body and spirit.
So she went to the woman, not even knowing what might happen.
And she had turned her.
Felicia doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know why—but she turned her.
She looks at Julia now, and finds the gray-haired woman glowering at her. Felicia can sense the woman’s mindscape as surely as Julia can sense hers: There’s a wave of itching doubt flowing out of Julia’s mind now, as she grapples with the lost power of her alien conviction. The objective remains, but the motivation is gone. She’s no longer under the strangers’ sway, but she’s having trouble reclaiming what she was.
Felicia gets it.
Because she still feels it.
Linda and Philip will get there. Eventually. And in the meantime, there is a power in their skulls that they don’t understand. A power that is somehow helping the survivors.
“They’re afraid of me,” she repeats, her words drifting away on the warm night breeze.
She knows Joel and the others have been anxious for her to embody this persona—as savior—but she has resisted.
The notion terrifies her.
She eases herself away from the window and positions herself against the side wall, watching the creatures. She can hear them, barely, gasping, grunting. Their footfalls occasionally slap the concrete sidewalk between islands of weedy bluegrass.
Her mind is bombarded by stimuli. Philip’s little-boy simplicity—troubled slumber and discomfort. Julia’s morphine ache, and Linda’s glower as she considers her plight and occasionally falls back on her probably dead family. Kayla’s empathy atop exhausted fear, attached to Rachel with a poignant anxiety. Rachel’s determination over all else, including bleak thoughts of loss and confusion surrounding her father, Michael. Scott’s weakening as his lifeblood seeps away—a strange, chaotic man at the edge of death.
Farther away, behind them, Joel’s determination mirroring Rachel’s—and not for the first time, Felicia catches whiffs of something else mirroring Rachel’s mind, and it brings a tiny, involuntary smile to Felicia’s lips.
Felicia turns her lips down, discouraging the smile.
Amidst all that, the cacophony of whispers and static that is her new reality, the thousands upon thousands of souls out there, human and stranger alike. And Nicole, shining like a beacon, due west.
Another involuntary smile, and Felicia grits it away.
She won’t be happy yet. She won’t allow herself that.
As she watches the three galloping bodies, she focuses hard on them, and as one, they swivel their heads toward her, as if responding to her. She can read their malicious thoughts not only in the sounds of their gasps but also in the patterns of their thoughts. It’s a red, collective rage. She knows that rage, remembers feeling that rage. It’s a rage that brings even more tears to her ravaged eyes.
The lead corpse, its limbs flailing madly as it runs, is named Devin. Felicia can see flashes of his life before the infestation. Swimming, family, occasional marijuana behind the house. Computer games, aspirations to entrepreneurship similar to her own. All of that nearly blotted away. Behind him is Melanie, her shorter limbs struggling to keep up. Felicia can sense deep friendships and a broken family, an abusive boyfriend, and a love for art—all of that buried beneath the savagery of her imprisonment. And bringing up the rear is the snarling Jonathan, an older man with long white limbs, his mind throttled by the strangers but hanging on to a devotion to his spouse, and a passion for model railroads.
Human passions, human experiences.
All three of them nearly naked, straining backward in their puppeteered bodies, limbs nearly torn from sockets, joints screaming, throats raw, skulls aglow with alien light.
Felicia’s hands are locked onto the lip of the side wall.
She targets her thoughts on the rushing trio as it bobs and weaves warily, closer and then farther away from the trucks. She knows the bodies want to attack. They’re itching for an opportunity—when the larger power can then detonate the source of their new lifeforce.
She won’t let them.
She swallows and closes her eyes.
Thrusts out.
A trio of electric pops, and the bodies immediately fall and slide across grass. Screams erupt from their ragged throats, and the sounds dwindle away behind them.
Felicia slumps against the side wall and feels herself slip helplessly to the grimy floor of the truck bed.
“Felicia?”
It’s Kayla’s voice, far away.
“Are you all right? Rachel, something happened to Felicia, she’s …”
The sound of Kayla’s girl-voice muffles and fades.
CHAPTER 24
As Felicia surfaces back into consciousness, she wades through an array of images from her human life—random memories from her CSU classes, mornings with Nicole, even blips from her childhood with her mom. She wakes with the feeling of these memories rushing at her insistently.
The truck is slowing, its rumble softening.
Kayla’s voice is still there, as if it never went away.
“… waking up, she’s waking up now, she’s …”
Groggy, Felicia finds the strength to sit up. The night is still deep-dark, and she squints over her persistent headache to take in the surroundings. How long has she been out? She feels a responsibility now to protect this crew from harm, and by passing out, she has shirked that responsibility. And following that up is the guilt of betraying what she became—however briefly. In the midst of that conflict, she makes a frustrated sound in her throat, wincing at the pain, and focuses.
She neither sees nor senses any malevolent bodies following them, or even near them in these neighborhoods. There are bodies there, outliers clinging to trees in lawns, bodies that never made the trek into the foothills, satisfied with what they found—but for whatever reason, they aren’t antagonistic. They’re remaining where they are, even as the survivors whisk by, heading toward the strangers’ terrestrial epicenter.
When Felicia turns her gaze west, she feels Nicole’s presence like a solid thing, something she can reach out and grab. They’re so close. She feels again that blast of anticipatory joy at the prospect of reuniting with her, despite her probable wrecked state—
—the memory of their night together, before everything fell, their bodies entwined—
She has no doubt now that they’ll find her. They have to. She has an almost irrationally strong conviction in her new ability. But she also knows the thing that has a stranglehold on her lover, and she has seen the effects of that stranglehold. She herself has felt only a fraction of those effects, and she was close to death. She’s under no illusions.
Before she sees the roadblock ahead of them, she feels Rachel’s reaction to it as she drives toward it. Alarm, dread, pessimism. Then the mass of vehicles becomes increasingly obvious in the truck’s headlamps, and Felicia knows in a red flash that the strangers constructed this obstacle themselves, using groups of infested corpses to push the heavy, stalled vehicles into place.
Rachel lurches the truck to a stop and turns off the engine. She swears, a blunt word.
The Hummer pulls up to the right of the truck, and Felicia is suddenly looking up into Joel’s eyes.
“How you holding up?” he asks her from his open window before turning to take in the full breadth of the roadblock. “Shit.”
“I’m better,” Felicia says. “More human.”
She can sense Joel’s anxiety about this new situation, the fear of being trapped. His policeman’s mind is working through escape routes and other options—she can see the math of it, and—again—she admires the way the
synapses fire. In front of her, Rachel’s mind works similarly but without the structure.
“Can you watch things while we clear this out?” Joel says, his eyes flitting from Julia to Linda to Philip. “I mean, you can do that, right? You can feel them getting close.”
She nods carefully.
“Thought so.” He studies the wide jumble of cars and trucks that have been jammed together.
The road drops off on both sides of Harmony at this exact point, precipitously, to allow the progress of a small creek. The road here is essentially a squat overpass above the water. This was strategic in the extreme. There’s no getting around this makeshift vehicle blockade.
“Anything we should worry about on the other side of that mess?” Joel asks her.
Felicia focuses on the road beyond the vehicles and senses no immediate threat, save for the massive glow farther out toward Masonville, where Nicole’s bright soul vibrates among hundreds of thousands.
“I don’t think so,” Felicia says.
He lowers his head to peer into the truck’s cab. “Rach, I’m gonna start shoving at those cars with the Hummer. Looks like there’s two rows of them, but shouldn’t be a huge problem for this beast. Watch my back, okay? All of you, especially you, Felicia.”
The twins hop out of the Hummer on the passenger side, each holding a weapon at the ready. Felicia feels their exhaustion and desperation but also their collective strength. She also catches a whiff of the anguished pride both twins feel. They know they’re doing their part in this battle.
The twins step over to the truck, nodding at Rachel and Felicia and gazing at the dark neighborhoods surrounding them.
They’ve made it to the edge of the foothills, Felicia realizes. They’re on Harmony now, west of Taft Hill, before the winding rise up to Horsetooth Reservoir. The roadblock appears to have been hastily cobbled together with vehicles abandoned on the road and others from nearby rural properties. She even spies a tractor. They’re surrounded by more wide-open land now, compared with that of the city proper.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 26
