“Joel!” Rachel yells, grabbing at Kayla protectively.
No way Joel can hear her over the roaring motors.
“Felicia?” Rachel cries, scrambling, and Felicia can read her overriding thought—
What do we do?!
Ahead of them, the Hummer lurches and goes dead. Rachel stares at it, and even Felicia can feel the yawning pit of hopelessness open up in the young woman’s center.
“Something’s wrong with Joel’s truck,” Kayla says.
“I see that,” Rachel says.
Chloe and Zoe nervously scrabble at the weapon reserves, taking up new rifles, touching hands briefly, acknowledging the threat, bracing themselves.
“Love you, sis,” Chloe whispers.
Zoe acknowledges this with a nod and a nervous half-smile, then turns to face the onslaught, now fifty yards away.
Rachel has steeled herself, too, taking hold of the wheel and surging forward toward the Hummer, coming up alongside the massive vehicle.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel screams.
“Axle’s broken or something!” Joel calls.
He’s already jumping down from the cab and leaping over the truck’s side walls.
“Get movin’!”
Rachel guns it, letting the clutch go too quickly, and the truck jerks and stalls. Felicia nearly stumbles off the truck bed to the asphalt—a strong grip on her ankle prevents her from that fate. She looks down and finds Linda has saved her. The woman’s face is scrunched in gasping pain, but she has saved her.
“Jesus, Rachel!” Joel shouts.
The silence fills with the sound of galloping, grunting bodies. The hills jitter with their luminescence. There are so many of them, a buzzing network of souls, and Felicia can only barely sense their humanity, so lost are they under the strangers’ influence. A thousand alien souls, screeching and gasping, their eyes turned up as their straining bodies dash over grasses and weeds and wildflowers. Their mindscapes flow against Felicia like a red tide, feral, angry, terrified of her but determined to strike.
Joel has registered a flash of panic. Everyone is yelling at once, crouching, shielding themselves behind the metal of the truck, and Felicia hears the motor turning over, a sound like an old man coughing. It catches just as Joel is about to leap back out of the truck bed, shove Rachel aside, and take control.
“You got it?” he gasps into the cab, and she nods, and he falls back next to Philip, who is looking bewildered, as if he’s recently awakened from a nap.
The truck heaves forward, and the scrambling bodies swarm as one toward the truck, closing in, veering in a new course like a flock of birds eyeing prey.
There are too many.
The thought quickens Felicia’s pulse.
“Get down!” Rachel cries at Kayla, at everybody, because the things are upon them.
Joel fires savagely into the fray, as do Chloe and Zoe. All three of them are braced against the truck’s side walls, their eyes barely over the rim. The twins are screaming, mindless, as their weapons unleash death and cure alike, and bodies begin to crash to the earth—but not enough of them.
“Felicia!” Joel yells. “Help! Please help!”
Even as Felicia pushes out with her mind, she shields her face with her forearm, protecting herself. The wave of bodies surges forward, and she hears the rat-tat-tat of twenty of them snapping back to humanity—the sound of flashbulbs, of paparazzi—but in the wake of those, as the bodies fall violently to the dirt, three or four more bodies explode like grenades, raining shrapnel against the truck.
Energy drains from Felicia like gushing water.
She staggers down next to Philip, who eyes her with little-boy confusion. His arms scramble for purchase on the truck bed, sliding along rust and dirt. She breaks the contact with Philip and peers again over the side. The next wave of bodies is upon them, leaping—
The truck fishtails, pauses alarmingly—
The passenger door swings open, and Scott staggers out, spinning, holding his side, falling to one knee and then crying out savagely as he lifts himself back up. He is ashen, delirious. Felicia is the only one who has seen him, and abruptly she senses his purpose. Everything stutters to slow motion. His eyes lock on hers for an eternity, and his mind is laid plain.
—Never thought I’d get out of this alive—
—Take them the rest of the way—
—I wish I could’ve been—
The words jitter away as he uses the last of his strength to run toward the bodies, and then his mindscape fractures under a clamor of ferocity as twenty bodies swarm him and explode at once. The shockwave of the blast is a visible ring of energy, sweeping out and buffeting the truck with a harsh wind. His final word arrives in her mind like a stuttered shout.
—better—
Felicia can barely protect herself from the spray of blood and bone and meat that follows. She weakly closes her eyes and lets her head loll to the left, but she feels the hot wetness of gore against her right ear. When she opens her eyes, they sting, but she can see Joel and the twins surging back to awareness, reacting to what happened.
“Was that—?” one of the twins starts.
“That was Scott,” Joel finishes grimly, gauging the vicinity for further threat. A coordinated wave of them has swept behind them and are giving chase.
“Why did he…?” someone yells.
The truck careens up the long switchback. Scott has bought them precious seconds. Yet another wave of bodies circles ahead, waiting for them.
“Reload!” Joel calls out.
Felicia sees him glaring at her, and feels the blunt shout of his thoughts like a shove—
—Now? You’re failing us now? —
—but she can barely move. She feels nearly paralyzed, not by fear but by an almost complete absence of energy. Even the clamor of souls around her, both survivor and infected, is muted and dwindling. Her chin rests heavily on the side wall, jarring and bouncing as Rachel navigates the twisting road, taking them ever higher up the switchback. Weapons explode all around her, but the sounds are distant, hollowly booming. Everyone is shouting.
Felicia drifts as in a dream …
… to the time she and Nicole drove this road together, the day before the invasion, on their way to Horsetooth Rock, laughing in tune with summer, blaring silly ’80s music in the warm confines of Nicole’s old Civic. Felicia driving, Nicole’s pretty bare feet on the dash, the color on her toes flaking now but still there—and Felicia remembers painting them, so meticulously as Nicole laughed, ticklish, lazing around the apartment the weekend before. Spotting four or five rigid deer on the right side of the road, studying them as they passed. Going only occasionally quiet when the realities of their lives intruded, and shaking those thoughts away and getting lost in the music again, and in the vivid details of a bright Colorado summer morning—the crisp, dry, deep blue of the high-altitude skies, the hillsides dotted with a rainbow of wildflowers, the satisfying crunch of tires on gravel as they motored into the Horsetooth parking lot, the sensual swab of sunscreen on each other’s skin, the donning of wide-brimmed hats, and an adventure ahead—
Felicia surges back to consciousness and flinches.
She staggers backward on painful limbs, away from the side wall, all her muscles clenched.
What’s happening?
A cacophony of sound and fury, swirling all around her.
And over it all, the call of Nicole, more urgent, she’s there, waiting for her, if only she can find her way.
Rachel is calling Felicia’s name repeatedly.
The truck shudders through the switchback’s tight right turn, too fast, nearly tipping. The survivors in the rear hold on for dear life. Felicia feels a throb of dread radiating from all of them.
“Here they come!” Rachel calls, straightening the truck into the lane and gunning it.
Felicia peers out into the dark wide-open, angling her head around the cab, and sees the bodies coming to a coordinated and poised pause,
in wait, their red throats pulsating, and it’s almost as if Felicia can read the luminescence, like a language forgotten over time.
Joel and the twins reload frantically, sweat pouring off them in streams, making everything slippery.
“Don’t get sloppy!” Joel calls. “Make every one count!”
Felicia feels another swell of energy, understanding the source now. On the filthy, rumbling bed of the ancient truck, Julia and Linda have crawled to her and grabbed hold of her lower legs, bracing her. Flesh to flesh. Julia, eyes still streaming, face twisted in agony, has a stranglehold on Felicia’s calf, and Felicia feels the woman’s lifeforce gushing into her, a hot blast of energy. On her other side, Linda has hold of her ankle, and Felicia follows the younger woman’s arm up to her shoulders, and to the face, to find her staring at her with pale earnestness, her long gray hair undulating against a backdrop of rust. Both women stare at her, giving their energy to her, pushing it into her.
Felicia clamors to her feet, grabbing at the cab window for support.
“I’m here,” she manages.
“Thank God!” Rachel yells, buzzing with purpose. The young woman has an overriding need to protect this crew and especially the little girl cowering next to her
Standing at the edge of the truck bed, Felicia faces the threat head-on, the souls of Linda and Julia threading through her own, those of the survivors bright and resonant. The sky is a black-and-crimson kaleidoscope, enraged. The truck barrels forward, and a hundred more bodies scramble forward, gasping, leaping over ridges and sprinting directly at them. Felicia beholds their webbed mindscapes like one raging organism, scattered though they are. And then they’re upon them.
“Down!” Joel says, yanking in his weapon and falling to the bed. The twins fall simultaneously, covering themselves as best they can.
At that moment, Felicia pushes outward with all her strength.
The closest bodies fall like wounded prey, raining to the earth as one, battering the sides of the truck, their orbs of light extinguishing with a collective, crackling thunder that pulls at the survivors’ eardrums, an implosive force. The bodies scream in new pain as they become human, and a dozen of them are trampled as Rachel adds her own scream to the barrage, not slowing, not easing up, and the truck pitches and swerves, and the survivors in the rear grunt and gasp, nearly flying out.
“Keep going!” Joel yells needlessly, as they can all hear the engine straining. “It’s not over.”
Amidst everything, he manages to wink at Felicia as she eases herself back to the truck bed, not completely sapped of energy this time but feeling a new wave of fatigue. The other women, Julia and Linda, appear similarly worn out, bowing their heads, closing their eyes, but they’re still affixed to Felicia, hanging on as if their lives depend on it—and Felicia knows they very well could. Their collective energy keeps flowing up into her; she feels it like liquid warmth, healing her, strengthening her, filling her—
—and she knows it’s another remnant of the infection, it’s something else lingering, the sense of communal power, the cooperative clout—
Rachel takes the next hard left, farther up the switchback, and now bodies are hanging back, wary. As the truck makes the final push toward the top of the ridge, the bodies merely watch them, their throats throbbing in time with the pulses from the sky. Felicia sees a throng of them fall back into the distance, then she turns back around, catching her breath.
Chloe and Zoe have both fallen weary to the ridged truck bed, staring at Felicia with shattered wonder. Their minds are clear, and twinned: Did you do that?
Felicia’s head slowly nods.
We did.
The truck crests the ridge, and Horsetooth Reservoir is laid out in front of them, black and slick. The road is dark and empty as Rachel propels them forward, along the rim, the weak headlamps wobbly and uncertain; the sound of the motor echoes out over the watery expanse. There’s no activity here. The weedy scree and low-lying shrubs of the gently rising cliffside to the left is treeless groundcover, no place for infected bodies. There are only a few pines dotted here and there, gnawed upon and abandoned. And neither is the water to their right any place for these infected bodies. The bodies are still vulnerable to most human frailties, particularly drowning.
Felicia feels this knowledge instinctually, like something learned long ago.
No, the bulk of the bodies still lay ahead, beyond the reservoir, about two miles along this road. Every one of the survivors stares at the light show in that direction. With proximity, it has stretched beyond comprehension. The columns of light are syrupy, solid things, miles wide, utterly alien.
“Oh my God,” one of the twins murmurs behind Felicia.
The luminescence flowing into the sky is a great pillar of shining energy that pulsates like a living being. Felicia feels it pulling at a small part of her, and there is a yearning there—something she’s missed out on. She considers that emotion, that ache. It’s distant and broken but still a part of her. A small bit of her still wants to be among them again, achieving the common objective.
But then a sneer takes her mouth. What they did to her, what she would have become had she not been locked in that storeroom …
She shudders, glances behind her.
The twins are on their knees atop the corrugated truck bed, holding hands as they watch the skies, their faces an uneasy combination of dread and incredulity. Their weapons are in their opposite grips, ready.
Julia, her hands still clutching Felicia’s leg, has backed up against the cab, and her eyes reflect the crimson lightshow. In the two women and boy Felicia turned back, Felicia senses what she herself feels. Not only that horrible yearning to be a part of that alien collective, but also self-disgust in the wake of that yearning. The power of it, the strength, even in the midst of existential thirst.
“You okay?” Joel says from the right wheel well, where he’s perched, watching her.
Startled, glancing over at him, she considers that. “Better.”
“Will it be enough?”
She clears her throat, winces with pain. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have enough left to … to face what we’re about to face?”
His expression is full of doubt, and it makes her insides shiver with anxiety. She feels this doubt, too, and she feels other things that she dares not tell him about. In her bones, she knows at any minute she might fall, drained of energy, to the corrugated floor. She also knows she hasn’t fully escaped the sway of the strangers.
“We can do it,” she says, wanting to repeatedly assure him.
And assure herself.
Her gaze drifts away, toward Nicole, who’s inching ever closer. But she can still feel Joel’s doubt. He’s reading the fact that she’s looked away as insecurity, and so she darts her eyes back to his, challenging his perception.
He’s nodding now.
“We won’t be able to do this with only these weapons,” he says.
“I know.”
There’s a pause, and he sighs heavily with exhaustion—she can smell it wafting off him, the odor of sweat and blood and fatigue.
“I trust you,” he says. Those are the words he uses, but she senses a different thought behind them.
We’re counting on you.
Felicia knows he’s reluctant to put voice to those words—with good reason. There’s too much responsibility there. She can barely handle it. And it’s just as bad, sensing that thought rather than hearing the words.
Then Joel turns to watch the yellow headlights shiver in the red-tinted night. He’s thinking about Rachel in the driver’s seat, forcing himself to ponder more pleasant things than alien invasions and reanimated bodies and whatever lies beyond this final rise. He’s thinking about a future that he knows will probably never come to pass. A future with Rachel, rebuilding, with Kayla, perhaps, finding a life amid ruin. A fantasy that blips like a brief dream and then sails away on the wind of the truck’s roar along the edge of the reservoir
.
“We’re going to do this,” Felicia says to him. “We’re going to beat them.” As these words leave her strained throat, she knows they sound weak.
He considers her, smiles thinly.
“Don’t worry,” she whispers.
Rachel makes the wide turn past the little general store that marks the edge of the reservoir’s south bay. For a moment, the truck’s headlights illuminate the small sign that says Stout, Colorado, in recognition of the town that was drowned by the reservoir when water filled the valley nearly seventy years ago. That bit of history fascinated Felicia when she first heard it, and she remembers telling Nicole about it on their own drive up here, so recently that the memory practically shouts at her.
“What are we about to do?” Chloe says, her eyes on the crimson columns radiating down on Masonville. “Are we actually going into that thing?”
Felicia senses new emotional turmoil in both the twins, compounded by weariness, and now Zoe stifles a moan.
“I mean,” Chloe goes on, “are we about to … to die?” Her hands are shaking uncontrollably on her weapon as she reloads it. “There aren’t many mags left. Ten?”
“And we’re almost out of blood.” Zoe’s voice cracks, and she clears her throat. She wipes her hands on her bloody jeans for the umpteenth time. “We’ve got maybe a dozen darts.”
“It’s okay,” Felicia says, her gaze focusing west on the bright spot among thousands. Nicole is waiting there for her. It’s too easy for her to imagine that her lover is alive around the bend, waiting with open arms, with a gasp of awe that they’ve both survived. She glances back at Zoe. “We won’t need that anymore.”
Zoe sniffs, nods. There’s something like bleak resignation in her expression. She’s sitting against the side wall, weapon loose in her lap, her palms up.
Felicia pushes into her mindscape and senses despair. The girl has interpreted Felicia’s words to mean that the truck is barreling into a suicide mission, and that their weapons will be inconsequential. Zoe has accepted that fate. But she also holds a thin trust in Felicia. A desperate trust. They all harbor it. Is it unearned? They saw what she did at the library, what she did do to the other occupants of this truck bed—the two women and the boy. They have felt safer with her. Can she earn that again? Or will she fail them?
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 28
