As if to punctuate that thoughtwave, Joel reaches over and takes her hand.
“You got this,” he says. “You’re doing great.”
Gripping the metal side wall of the rusty truck, Felicia closes her eyes and concentrates. An entirely different lightshow kaleidoscopes in the blackness behind her eyelids, and Nicole remains its brilliant center. Beyond her and surrounding her, a hundred thousand souls jitter in unrest, a great agitated swarm. And the closer she gets to the concentration of strangers, the more clearly she can read their collective sensations—the hunger, the single-minded drive, and the suffocated humanity.
A humanity that is almost completely gone now, beneath the spine-cracking sway of the alien infection.
The truck makes the final turn toward the Horsetooth trailhead, and Felicia opens her eyes.
The survivors emit a collective gasp, and Rachel jerks the truck to the left, braking briefly, then forging ahead.
Across the sprawling mountainside to the right is a Boschian landscape of twisted humanity, bodies interlocked with one another, a massive throbbing collective lifeform crushing the forestry, moving sinuously among the thousands of splintered trees, merging with them, taking from them. Against the larger evergreen specimens, humans are piled into pyramids, reaching high into the stiff branches, searching with their mouths, attached ten and fifteen feet high, scraping and sucking. Their collective crimson energy ripples skyward, crackling, pulsing. As soon as Felicia sees the roiling mass of infected humanity with her own eyes, she experiences a harsh, involuntary cough and wheeze. The web of souls is an overwhelming force, bludgeoning her senses, thousands of voices screaming in her ears, a trillion synapses firing at once.
She stumbles to her knees, and then—as Linda and Julia also succumb to the sensory maelstrom—to all fours on the corrugated metal of the truck bed. She feels the overwhelming urge to drop, prostrate, to the floor.
“Felicia!” Joel cries, pulling at her upper arm.
But Felicia feels herself curling into a fetal position.
It’s too much!
The voices bombard her mind—and she realizes that they are aware of her, all of them are aware of her, and the strangers above are conscious of her malicious intentions, and those of the rest of the survivors. She has a devastating sensation of all those bodies turning to face her, intent on destroying her.
They have been lying in wait.
Even Nicole.
Now the truck jerks to a stop, and Felicia, unable to move, is vaguely aware of the survivors shouting. Joel attempts uselessly to lift his weapon while pulling at Felicia. She knows he’s counting on her, counting on her desperately, but the import of that floats away like a speck of ash. He’s yelling at her, but the sound is a muffled nothing. Julia and Linda have wrapped their arms around their heads, having let go of Felicia, and all of their collective power has dissipated.
There is only the clamor of infected souls, almost completely given over to the strangers, and they are cramming her head with noise. Nicole is banshee-shrieking at her, a nightmare screech communicating all the desperate greed and hate of the presence entrenched in Nicole’s skull, controlling her like a meat puppet. Felicia cowers under the bray, tears flowing from her squeezed-shut eyes as her own memories of Nicole are obliterated, piece by piece, moment by moment, like photographs blackening and curling in fire.
“Nicole,” Felicia whimpers on the truck’s floor.
She lets her body go limp, understanding that her world—the entire world—is ending. She relaxes on to her back, her muscles relaxing, and finally she stares straight up into the purple sky, up through the vortex, up into the rippling throat of the column of crimson fire, and her eyes go wide, emotions bloat her throat, there they are, there are the strangers, a billion twitching limbs pulling at the rising energy, hurrying its upward flow, insectile antennae, an insatiable kaleidoscope of biological need, drawing up, taking, storing. She can hear their collective hunger like throaty entreaties, underscored with a shattering anger—an anger born of fear, the fear of ultimately failing this interstellar quest for a single complex nutrient, a quest that has so far failed on many levels, in so many galaxies, and the dread that this green planet, so far away, after so many distant and frantic searches, is their final hope—and it is dwindling.
Knowing all that, understanding the plight of the strangers, the few survivors in this truck still mean more to her than this entire alien species.
The sky opens with an earth-shattering roar.
Felicia hardly notices.
A starburst has opened in her vision, and she feels the pulse of a new power—at least enough to raise herself up. She blinks, stares around at the bleary, beaten faces of the survivors, cringing in anticipation of the end. She sees that Linda and Julia have overcome their own terror and have added their energy to hers, reattaching themselves to her lower legs with trembling hands. Felicia welcomes the incremental surge of power, rising through her legs and into her chest, and she struggles up to face the alien collective.
The mountainside is alive with infected humans, disengaging from their hungry attachments to target the survivors once and for all. Their collective sound is that of an echo-chamber swarm of wasps. They begin scrambling down the mountain.
Rachel grabs Kayla, smothering her, protecting her.
“Close your eyes, honey,” she whimpers, and even Felicia can hear it over everything.
Here they come, Felicia breathes.
CHAPTER 26
Rachel watches Felicia falter, sees her face jerk with indecision and doubt, and it is at that moment when Rachel realizes—finally—that her luck, the luck of all the survivors, has run out. It’s simply a twitch of Felicia’s lower lip that sends Rachel tumbling toward blackness. She feels herself going limp, even as her peripheral vision fills with frenzied alien movement, human puppets.
Next to her, Joel clutches the side of the truck, watching the approach of their doom. He snatches a quick glance at Felicia, barks something desperate at her that Rachel can’t decipher, and then the corners of his own mouth tic down in hopelessness.
Above them, the atmosphere swirls in turmoil. She feels as if she is at the base of a mighty tornado, doomed to be ripped up into its violence, torn apart, obliterated.
Rachel grabs Kayla, clinging tight.
“Close your eyes, honey,” she whispers to the child.
When the thunder crashes from above, it seems to physically press her into the truck’s bench seat. Rachel hugs Kayla as if she’s her last hold on her own humanity, and Kayla herself has gone rigid, staring up into the eye of the nightmare tornado, as if daring it yet again to cross her. Her little body is wiry, squirming, and Rachel holds tight, protective at all costs.
She grits out a harsh scream against the onslaught of sound, but she can’t even hear her own roaring voice.
From her place in the cab, she can squint her eyes open to see the thousands of bodies across the mountainside, and all of them are twitching away from their trees, their bodies stuttering, reacting to the thunder from above. As one, they turn their insectile heads to face the pitiful band of survivors at the road’s edge.
Rachel squeezes into a tight ball around Kayla, her thoughts breaking into shards. What have we done? she thinks wearily under the chaos. Why are we here? Why did we think—?
Felicia behind her is still standing at full height, even under the buffeting onslaught.
Rachel’s head blunts into a muffled silence. Energy crashes out of her. Her eyelids flutter, and—
—the face of her father looms before her—
She recoils behind desperately closed eyes.
—and her father is shouting at her, an image too easily summoned, but no, his eyes are filled with love and concern and fear, it’s not anger, and for some reason she connects his expression to that money, all that damned money, what did it all mean, Daddy? Why are you gone, and why did you leave a mystery in your wake, when despite everything I love you and
need you more than I ever have …?
The questions stab out from her in the space of a millisecond.
—and her father listens impassively now, and there are stutter-images of her mother, so faded now, as if her only memories of her now are conjured from old photographs, rendered brittle with time, caught in another era …
“Mommy …” she feels herself murmur.
—and the face of her mother transforms from still image to flesh, coming alive with color and resonance, and—
Rachel’s eyelids flutter spasmodically.
—her mother smiles, and Rachel can feel the blood-warmth of the gesture, like fresh tears on skin, and inside the vision she explodes with tears, yearning for the time, years ago, when she would curl against her mother on the couch, watching TV, or run toward her across the patchy lawn and embrace her, both of them in their colorful gardening gloves, the smell of soil in the air so strong that it felt as if roses might bloom spontaneously everywhere …
—but her mother only smiles, glancing down—
Rachel realizes that her mother is looking down at Kayla, as if from one world to the next, and Rachel curls against the girl more tightly, protecting her with her whole body as the thunderous approach of the bodies intensifies, ready to engulf them. Kayla’s flesh trembles with sweaty heat, as if adrenaline is seeping from her pores, and she’s screaming into Rachel’s shoulder.
—and Rachel turns from gloomy past to fading future in an instant, and it’s Kayla’s smile she’s seeing now, an older Kayla, an impossible Kayla, the Kayla that perhaps a small part of her believed she was protecting all this time, a Kayla whose future lay in her incapable hands. That Kayla will never happen, and neither will the future that Rachel occasionally glimpsed in rare moments of optimism, a future that she never deserved, surely, but that still reared up like flashes of bleak hope at the back of her head during humid nights at the library, in the wee hours, holding the scared girl as she cried for her lost family. Joel coming to her in the night and holding her and comforting her and the girl both with his large confident hands, and could Rachel be blamed if Joel was a part of that imagined future? The image of her first encounter with Joel, in the center of Old Town as it burned, immediately protective and in control, and somehow their fates aligned, and so of course she imagined the trajectory of that alignment continuing along a straight line toward a future together, and now that straight line has ended in a terrible blot.
Kayla is tugging at her.
“Rachel!” Kayla says. “Wake up!”
Rachel opens her eyes, feeling a surge of alertness.
The girl is grabbing her arms and shoulders, urgent.
“What?” Rachel cries.
“Look!”
Rachel wrenches her gaze upward.
Felicia has risen to full height, and her mouth is open, emitting a crimson glow into the pre-dawn. Light escapes her like a scream rendered into luminescence. Everyone is reaching over to Felicia now, wanting to help her, emulating the strange touch of the turned bodies, the way they have clung to Felicia as if to share their energy.
And then Rachel herself grabs ahold of the woman’s upper arm, through the open rear window, in support of her impossible power, and Kayla does too. And Joel is there, staring into Rachel’s eyes, holding on to Felicia and Kayla and Rachel, holding fast to the lot of them in the rusty bed of a besieged truck. And the twins, teary and sweaty and terrified, dive in to the pile, holding on to tight, adding to the chorus of defiant screams. Rachel feels her throat go scorched, and she doesn’t care, it’s her end anyway, and she screeches out her rage and rebelliousness again and again.
Just as the edge of the horde reaches the truck, she and the rest of them flinch down, and she sees the face of the boy, the little boy they turned back. He’s clutching Felicia, and in the squashed blackness of the truck bed, his residual glow seeps out from his little mouth, not inspiring fear but rather dark hope.
CHAPTER 27
Felicia stands to full height.
When she does so, she’s aware of the hands on her flesh, everyone around her but particularly the small hand with the forceful heat. It’s that of the boy, Philip, who is looking up into her eyes with a look of resolve on his innocent face—
—this little boy, powerful in his innocence, resilient in his youth, new to the world, already mostly healed from the infestation, unaware of his own strength except in his determination to be among them, to add his lifeforce to those of the survivors, to band together against the threat surrounding them and return to his sane life of parents and toys and laughter, oblivious to the fact that he never will. His mind is small and emergent, but it is buzzing with the potential of all humanity, and Felicia eases into its blankness and lets it overcome her—
Power floods her, and she can’t help but cry out raggedly, helplessly.
She lets the power fill her, and then she unleashes it across the mountain.
The pulsing orbs in the throats of a thousand infected humans extinguish in a crackling wave, spreading up and away across the mountainside, leaving the bodies to fall to the soft earth, screaming in pain. A dozen batter the truck’s sides and gate with a clatter. A multitude die instantly, their bodies too far gone, their injuries too severe to overcome. Felicia feels their mindscapes evaporating, so fragile, like candle flames blown out, and she mourns every single one, the emotion only fueling her outpouring. She pushes harder, harder still, and the wave of alien expulsion swells, choking the crimson throat above her. The energy column shudders and sizzles, breaking apart in a crackling shockwave.
The survivors awaken around her, numb and shivering, peering around at one another. The truck bed is an entwined mass of beleaguered human beings, still clutching at each other desperately for strength—abruptly and unexpectedly alive in the face of certain death. Stunned and shaking, Joel breaks away and laboriously reloads his weapon, then holds it at the ready, barrel trembling. He peers up squinting into the broken sky. Crimson shards of light fall away like a failing prism—Felicia feels as if she half-understands facets in the geometry but senses that understanding crumbling. She hyperventilates as she strains.
Rachel cautiously peers up and out, her eyes filled with tears, Kayla trembling beneath her.
“What happened?” Kayla whines into the sudden absence of activity. “Are we dead?”
Felicia continues to push, fueled by the survivors around her, and it’s their collective energy that continues to engulf her with positive energy, filling her up and exploding outward, repeatedly. She gives over control to the three of them, letting their energy work through her.
“Fucking hell,” Joel whispers, watching the orbs of energy. “I think it worked.”
The twins can only watch, their weapons loose in their grip, as the end approaches.
Beneath the falling skies, bodies writhe across the forest floor, a sprawling expanse of human ruin. Decimated trees tower above the many-hued flesh, leaning as if in pain, considering the creatures that have stressed them. Their lower branches are bent and snapped, their trunks scraped of bark and sap. Heaps of bodies are everywhere.
Philip is clutching Felicia’s left leg tightly, his little face clenched in concentration, and as his lifeforce flows through her, an unflinching healing strength, Felicia senses the moment Nicole’s infection ends. She hears her lover’s scream, deep inside, feels her return to humanity. She can sense it halfway up the mountain, amidst a hundred other abruptly changed souls, writhing in the dirt.
Felicia struggles against the arms clutching her, aching to jump down into the sea of bodies and wade toward her lover, but the survivors are still holding strong, nervous about letting go. She bends down to speak into the window of the cab.
“I need to go up there.” She gestures.
“Go where?” Rachel asks, not understanding anything but a fierce and cautious relief.
Felicia doesn’t know how to communicate what she needs. All she can do is blurt out Nicole’s name.
“I need—”
“Finish it!” Joel shouts at her, and she barely understands him over the screams of anguish all around. “Finish it first!”
In anguish, Felicia funnels another burst of energy outward, and she can see it radiate like a concussive pulse. It ripples up the mountainside and into the weakening crimson throat. Another roar comes thundering down at her, but it fragments into weak bursts. Felicia roars back, yet again, her actual voice tiny in the turbulence of sound, but her vigor gigantic. Luminescence continues to fall in shards to the earth, collapsing and impacting as if with weight. At the same time, alien souls shoot skyward, crackling out as they traverse the deep blackness of the night.
Nicole is alone.
She’s still there, her energy weak. Felicia can sense her pulse, and her pain.
Sobbing, Felicia pushes upward and outward again, as if belching fire. Her mouth opens, and energy pours out in yet another healing wave, climbing the mountainside, and more humans fall to the dirt, screaming in agony. And now it’s a series of waves, expelling the alien infection, crisscrossing the mountain and scattering down the slopes, down the foothills, and into the city.
More.
She screams forth yet another wave of energy, and strobes of lightning tear the fabric of the alien column, the insectile limbs jerking spasmodically and finally going rigid, becoming dry husks and instantly crumbling. And a cancerous blackness overtakes the alien throat, burning, and Felicia can hear the screams of the dying strangers, and she no longer holds empathy for them. Nicole is alone among the dead on the mountain face, and Felicia screeches her defiance and rage.
She feels her energy waning, but it is enough, she knows.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 29
