Chapter 25: Jak
"Come on, Jak, don’t die! Please!"
Somebody was shaking his body, but he wasn’t in it. Nobody home.
"You think I want to be stuck by myself out here in the middle of nowhere? Live! You hear me? Live!"
He knew the voice, but he couldn’t remember the face. The voice was laughter with an iron will, flirtatious warmth, and calculating intelligence. The sound lapped in and out of hearing, like waves breaking and receding while he floated on calm waters, without past or future. On the shore? Something familiar, but the vision was fuzzy, the image distorted.
"Jak! Jak!"
Pain. Pain in his chest. A small, hand holding his, squeezing hard. One more small hurt. Shut off the pain, and he was dead. He drifted, ignoring the pleading voice, floating close by the island of the dead, but never quite all the way to the shore. Since he was a ghost among ghosts, what he saw, he saw dimly. He watched as civilizations rose and fell like tides. Strange cultures ebbed and flowed—human and alien—but somehow not alien to him. Memories flooded into his mind—stronger, faster, sweeping him away. He was drowning in the torrent, and still the memories came. He was torn apart, losing himself in too many lifetimes.
. . . laughing as I ride crazy-fast on a two-wheeled ground vehicle . . . on stage singing in a sweet and piercing soprano . . . secreting material to build a huge black hive and writing our history on it as I do so. . . frantic, calling for my son as he disappears into the rushing water . . . running a drill . . . wounded in a firefight . . . taking eggs as the queens lay them and placing them in the chamber . . . playing with a puppy . . . mother . . . hunter . . . hatchling . . . sailor . . . carpenter . . . host body . . . priest . . .
The memories swept by faster and faster. Shuddering, he fought to pull himself out of the flood. He fought to keep his sense of self, his small, short-lived self that had been so hard won. Struggling, he gained control of that ever-increasing river and slowed it. The flood became a stream, the stream a trickle, until there was time enough to choose, to find the one thing he wanted—his own past.
. . . alone at a battered table in a nameless bar. . . here is my client with his oddly silent partner. I look up at the two men, one medium height with smooth regular features and cunning eyes. The partner is taller, taller than I am, with the blank face that said nothing much happened behind his eyes.
"Time to go," the client says. We go out into the hot darkness. "The ground-car is over here." Taking my arm, he steers me around the side of the building. It’s dark in the side street.
The partner shoves me against the nearby wall and pins me there. Then the client is on me, too. Abruptly, the client’s face is on mine, the client’s tongue in my mouth.
I struggle, but the two men hold me easily.
And then it begins; a creeping sense of otherness at first. A sense of something moving, tasting, inside my head. This isn’t a rape, I realize, at least not in the usual human terms. I feel the alien something growing within me.
I feel it when it reaches my brain. The client leans over me, nose to nose, staring into my eyes as if he can see what was going on in my head.
One mind, multiple bodies. Hosts, it calls them. The client and his assistant are one being. But it needs more hosts in order to complete its plans, and it doesn’t want to take time to grow them. It wants to add me to the collection. But that isn’t going to happen! This body is already occupied, so get the hell out! I fight with savage strength, fight the greatest battle of my life, all inside my own mind.
The thing ignores me and burrows through my memories, like a new homeowner clearing out the previous occupant’s mess. I fight, but it digs deeper and deeper. The trip here, the escape, my work for my father, time at the academy, childhood; all fly away into darkness. And still the thing digs deeper, until I no longer remember why I fight, only that I must. It digs past earliest memories of warmth and soft skin, past pain and bright lights, and then it strikes the bedrock of what makes my soul human. Memories spew through my mind, through the invader’s mind. Thousands of memories, millions. We fall into the collective unconscious of humanity, and we’re swept away into a myriad of lives.
Hiding in the long grass to hunt antelope, screaming as I give birth, building a new house for a farmer, running for my life from the mob, teaching a classroom full of children, dying with my family around me, a first kiss warm on my lips . . . . More and more memories stream by. I’m lost in them. I feel the other struggle to pull away. Hands release my body, and I slide down the wall in the alley while other lives sparkle through my brain.
"Kill it!" I hear the client scream. Kill what? Kill who? He stumbles past me, clutching his head. "Kill it now!"
The other is almost gone from my mind. Only a fragment remains. I’m able to open my eyes just in time to see a piece of rebar descending.
A hand touched his face. The palm felt cool and gentle against his feverish skin. "Just lie still," a voice said, the same voice he’d heard before.
Tessa. If his face hurt less, he’d have smiled. He closed his eyes and drifted again, this time into a deep, healing sleep.
Omniphage Invasion Page 25
