The Darkening
Page 30
She's so light, Tyreese thought as he carried Birdy's almost weightless body to the metal examination table. He laid her down gently, and brushed away an errant frost-stiff lock of hair that had fallen across her closed lids. She looks so peaceful, he thought, so perfect. And it was in that moment that he knew that he was right to be afraid for her, afraid of her, because the cut to Birdy's cheek, the one she had gotten when she was trying to get to the SWAT van, was gone. Vanished, healed as though it had never been there, leaving behind flawlessly smooth skin.
He had to work fast.
Tyreese pulled back the cloth Birdy was wrapped in enough to expose her budding left breast, reached down and picked up the wooden garden stake he had taken from the nurse's station.
"God, forgive me," Tyreese whispered and raised the stake in both hands until his arms were above his head.
"Stop right where you are and drop the weapon."
Tyreese spun around. He hadn't heard the door open, certainly had not heard Doctor Wu and the security guard enter the mortuary. The guard had a large caliber pistol aimed directly at Tyreese.
"Drop the weapon," the security guard repeated. "I won't ask again." The guard must have been ex-police or maybe military or maybe he had gotten some half-decent training, Tyreese thought, because his shooting stance was perfect. The guard's eyes were focused on Tyreese, his pistol aimed directly at his torso; center of mass, just like he'd been trained to do.
"You don't understand what you're dealing with," Tyreese said, his voice surprisingly calm to his ears. "I can't take the chance that she'll turn... into one of them."
No way was anyone going to listen to him, Tyreese knew that. There was zero chance they would believe his story. At best, if he laid down his weapon and surrendered he was looking at hours of interrogation in some cop station, and, if by some stroke of good luck, he found someone who did believe his story (a story, that quite frankly he himself still found hard to believe), by that time it would be too late and Birdy would have been unleashed on Las Vegas. And he could not allow that to happen.
Tyreese turned his back on the guard. "I don't have a choice," he said flatly. He raised his hands above his head again and brought the stake down with all the force he could muster. He felt the hammer-blow slam into his left shoulder a split-second before he heard the gunshot.
There was no pain, not immediately, anyway. Tyreese staggered. He half-turned and looked back toward the security guard and the doctor; Wu's eyes were wide open, her mouth forming an 'o' of surprise and shock. The guard was yelling something at him, the man's lips moved but Tyreese could not hear what he was saying. His world had gone completely and terribly silent.
Tyreese felt the beat of his heart reverberating inside his chest; the frantic bump, bump, bump echoed against his eardrums. His left arm hung uselessly at his side. A thick stream of blood ran down past his elbow to his wrist and over his fingers, and a bright red pool had already formed next to his naked feet. His eyes moved to Birdy; a crimson spray covered her face, droplets of his blood had splashed across her lips.
Tyreese raised the stake again in a feeble last ditch attempt to finish what he had started.
The second bullet hit Tyreese hard in the back. He let out a deep grunt as the force of the bullet spun him 180 degrees. He stumbled backward, grabbing for the edge of the cadaver table. His fingers found no purchase on the slick stainless steel. The stake clattered to the tiled floor as Tyreese slowly sank to a sitting position, his back against the cold steel of the table.
A thick ribbon of blood flowed across the tiles, following the slight decline toward the open mouth of a small drain. His blood, he realized as he looked down at his chest and the bright red bloom that had seeped into the cloth around a jagged hole in his hospital gown.
Through-and-through wound, Tyreese thought. The rent-a-cop isn't as bright as I gave him credit for, the idiot's using full metal jacket rounds. He heard his breath rasping with each intake and exhalation of air he made, small bubbles appeared in the blood around the exit hole. Nicked a lung, he thought. Fuck! He tried to speak, but his jaw just wouldn't cooperate. He managed to raise his head to look at the security guard; he still had the pistol pointed at him, his face was almost as ashen as Dr. Wu's.
"Get on the ground!" the guard screamed. He sounded close to snapping. And for a second, Tyreese thought he was going to be shot again. Truth was, he would welcome it; he was tired now. So goddamned tired. And the pain of the two bullet wounds was beginning to pulse through him, like sharp lightning bolts.
Dr. Wu stepped in front of the guard, her eyes fixed on Tyreese as she started to move toward him, her instinct to protect and heal her patient overwhelming the desire to run away.
She was halfway across the room to Tyreese when Birdy sat up.
"Jesus Christ!" The guard screamed in surprise. His gun moved to Birdy, then back to Tyreese.
Doctor Wu yelped too, danced away from Birdy, then stopped in her tracks and stared at the supposedly 'dead' kid, her mouth agape. "Oh my God," she whispered and rushed toward Birdy.
Tyreese tried to speak. He wanted to tell the guard to shoot Birdy, but all that came out of his mouth was an incomprehensible mumble.
"Get some help...," Doctor Wu yelled at the security guard. "...Now!" she ordered when the guard didn't move.
"What about him?" the guard said, nodding toward Tyreese.
Doctor Wu turned for a second and looked at Tyreese. "He's not going anywhere," Wu said, "Now get—" Wu's words turned into a yell of surprise as Birdy's hand flew to the doctor's head, her fingers grabbed a handful of the woman's hair and tugged the doctor's head toward her. The doctor's astonishment almost instantly turned into a scream of pain as Birdy bit deep into the soft flesh of the woman's throat.
The guard advanced across the floor toward Doctor Wu and Birdy, his gun lowered, mouth open as though he had forgotten what he wanted to say, and stopped. He took a step backward and raised the gun at Birdy, then dropped it again as he realized he could not fire without hitting the doctor.
"Let go of her," he managed eventually. "Drop her right now."
Tyreese did not know whether Wu somehow managed to free herself or if Birdy simply was done with her, but the doctor suddenly staggered back from the cadaver table, one hand clasped to her throat as blood gushed from between her fingers. The doctor spun in a slow pirouette and briefly met Tyreese's eyes with her own; they were wide with terror and confusion, and, Tyreese thought, a terrible understanding that he had been right. She staggered toward him, her right arm stretched out in front of her, a trail of blood spurting in a red arc through the air behind her.
The security guard opened fire. Four rounds in quick succession. Two hit Birdy in the chest, spinning her around. The other two shots missed, ricocheting around the room.
Birdy's eyes snapped to the guard, a crimson spray flying from her blood-soaked mouth. She snarled viciously, like some gutter dog, then jumped from the cadaver table straight up. She hit the ceiling, her hands sticking to it as if she were a giant naked fly, and snarled at the guard. The two exit wounds in her back were both almost healed.
The guard gibbered a string of nonsensical words that could have been a prayer, staggering backward in disbelief. His legs tangled and he went down hard, sprawling across the tiles, the pistol in his hand all but forgotten. He scrambled upright and began a panicked sprint toward the exit, arms flailing.
Birdy scuttled across the ceiling, launched herself through the air, and landed on the guard's back. The man screamed in terror as the momentum of the collision toppled both he and Birdy through the two doors separating the mortuary from the exit into the rest of the hospital.
Tyreese heard two final gunshots, followed by a scream that seemed to last forever before finally fading to nothing.
Tyreese's vision had begun to blur, the room growing dimmer then brightening again as shapes swam into then out of focus. The pain was beginning to burrow through his muscles, eating its way to hi
s brain. It hurt every time he breathed in; each breath sounding raspier than the last.
Doctor Wu lay on her side facing Tyreese, one hand behind her head, the other stretched out in front of her. She did not move. She did not even blink as blood continued to seep from her, forming a pool in front of her head that slowly expanded across the floor.
Tyreese's world faded out again. When his vision returned Birdy was sitting cross-legged in front of him, staring intently, like a child inspecting a particularly fascinating bug, her wounds all healed.
"Hello... Birdy," Tyreese wheezed. He supposed that he should have felt a sense of fear or panic, but all he actually felt was indifference. He was a dead man either way, that was an undisputable fact, and he was okay with that. He was tired of fighting, tired of all of it.
"Birdy," he whispered. "I'm sorry." He reached out a hand toward the child's face.
Birdy snatched his arm from the air before his fingers could reach her, drew it close to her mouth as her lower jaw distended, and bit down into his flesh.
Birdy began to drink deeply.
As the last reserves of blood left Tyreese's veins, warmth was replaced by cold, stillness, and light was replaced with welcome darkness.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveller between life and death;
She Was a Phantom of Delight
~ William Wordsworth ~
EPILOGUE
A narrow stream of rainwater gurgled across the floor of the storm drain. Above the curve of the drain's ceiling, through layer-upon-layer of desert dirt topped by a crust of asphalt, the dull rumble of passing Las Vegas traffic accompanied the constant thud-thud-thud of music as it echoed through the tunnel, reverberating off the concrete walls; the heartbeat of Las Vegas.
For most of the last forty-eight hours, Birdy had hidden within this tunnel system snaking beneath the city; hundreds of miles of drains and interconnected flood channels spread out across Las Vegas like arteries. Perhaps it would have mattered to her if she were still a human child that the drains were surprisingly clean thanks to the rain that had recently swept through them. But Birdy was no longer human, and the only thing that mattered to her now was that the permanently dark concrete tunnels offered her shelter from the destructive rays of the sun.
There was food down here, too. Wretched humans living their lives within the confinement of the tunnels; social outcasts, the mentally ill, the lost. Easy prey for Birdy. Over the past two days she had gorged herself on the pathetic creatures she stalked, the perpetual darkness allowing her to never have to sleep, never have to nest. The constant commotion of the city above drowning out the cries of terror and pain of her victims.
She was strong now, powerful beyond anything she had ever imagined when she was alive. Although it would be impossible to describe Birdy as being even close to human any longer, at her core she was still a child, with a child's delight and fascination for her new existence. Her past life was little but a memory, a fading remnant that fluttered within her brain like decayed clothing, her previous personality all but consumed by the constant gnawing hunger woven through the very core of this new being she had become; it was a beautiful driving force that she could barely restrain. But Birdy sensed she needed to be patient. There was another to watch over now, her progeny; one that would soon join her in her strange new world.
Birdy looked down at the body concealed within a bundle of old and faded blankets that had once been a tunnel dweller's bed, cocooned and hidden while the time of change took its course. If any human accidentally stumbled across her nest they would think they had found a dead body, but Birdy saw with stranger eyes the changes taking place beneath the skin of what had once been a man. The powers altering his organs and bones and muscle into something new were ancient and dreadful, they pulsed and throbbed within him, radiating an invisible light, imperceptible to all but vampire eyes.
A slow pulse began to beat at the center of Birdy's brain, the interval between each beat shortening with each passing minute.
Soon, darkness would return.
As if the body lying next to Birdy had sensed her thoughts, the tangle of bedding shifted slightly. She moved closer, loosened some of the sheets enough to see the body and two freshly grown limbs beneath, the darker skin still mottled with spots of new pink flesh.
Birdy sat back on her haunches and waited as the drumbeat within her mind grew faster and faster until it was almost a hum, building to a crescendo as some supernatural ability sensed the day was finally done.
Several hundred feet away at the mouth of the tunnel, the dying light of day lost its battle and succumbed to the darkening world, and with its arrival, the beat within Birdy's head was silenced.
Tyreese opened his eyes.
~ Fin ~
Acknowledgments
My thanks go out to my editor Karen Boehle-Johnson for her incredible work on helping me pull this book together. I am in your debt. And to Kelly Graffis — the best beta reader a writer could ask for. Also to Lance MacCarty for his patience and hard work designing The Darkening’s cover. I’d also like to thank my wife for always being willing to listen to my thoughts and questions, and always being ready to give me her input.
And last, but not least, I want to thank you, dear reader, for choosing to spend your precious time in my imaginary worlds.
About the Author
A native of Cardiff, Wales, Paul Antony Jones now resides near Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and commercial copywriter, but his passion is penning fiction. A self-described science geek, he’s a voracious reader of scientific periodicals, as well as a fan of things mysterious, unknown, and on the fringe. Paul is the author of six books, including the bestselling Extinction Point series and Toward Yesterday.
You can learn more about Paul and his upcoming releases via his blog at www.DisturbedUniverse.com or his Facebook page www.facebook.com/AuthorPaulAntonyJones/
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
- LOS ANGELES - Nine days later
FRIDAY
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
SATURDAY
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
SUNDAY
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
MONDAY
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
TUESDAY
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR