by Ann Aguirre
Micheline screamed, and the sound drove nails into my heart and ripped it in two. I punched the trigger. The gunshot cracked the air open, leaving me alone with the shock of silence. Mrs. Helsing crumpled. Christ, I heard my own pulse pounding in my ears. Gunsmoke burned my throat. Nothing moved in the panic room, except for the cherry ooze dripping out the back of Mrs. Helsing’s skull.
Bloody,
Bloody,
Bloody,
Hell.
NOW
Jude drops his gun and grabs the Glasgow girl’s wrists, keeping her from tearing into his face.
The male rushes me, his claws spread wide. His shriek snaps me back, and I realize the girl Jude’s fighting looks nothing like Mrs. Helsing—she’s a brunette and too tall. I shoot her off him, then pivot to face the male charging at me. My rifle shouts and bucks into my shoulder. The male tumbles to the ground, loose-limbed. He rolls to a stop just a few feet away from me, his vacant eyes staring at the sky. Blood seeps out from the hole I punched in his corpse, his dead blood black as crude oil.
Jude hunches over, hands on his knees, coughing and spitting. He uses his index finger to check the corners of his mouth for cuts. Glaring at me, he grabs his gun off the ground, straightens, and kicks the Glasgow’s corpse as he walks away.
Jude can walk away; Micheline almost didn’t. My bloody hesitation’s almost killed two of my best mates now.
That night broke me, too, the way it broke Micheline and her old man. I never guessed my cracks would spread so easy—if I want to help Micheline, I’ve got to start by keeping my own shit together.
Setting my rifle’s stock against my shoulder, I follow Jude to the rendezvous point.
I won’t hesitate again.
THAT NIGHT
“Micheline?” I pointed my gun’s muzzle at the floor, surprised by how hoarse my voice sounded. By the way it echoed, as if I were the last thing living in the world. “Micheline?” I asked again, louder this time. She didn’t answer. Dammit, don’t die on me, girl, I thought, sprinting for the panic room.
I shut out the gore on the walls and the small, tattered corpses on the floor. I grabbed Mrs. Helsing by the shoulder and yanked her away, and damned if the body wasn’t still warm. A freshie, even, her mouth a smear of red and her eyes all fogged up. My .45 caliber bullet smashed her forehead open. White-blond hair fanned out around her, soaking up the blood on the floor. Her fingers still twitched.
Micheline sobbed and scrambled away from her mum’s body, spattered in blood and bone, bruised, and bleeding from a bite in her trapezius muscle. She pressed two shaking fingers against the wound, her chin trembling when she pulled her hand back and saw her bloodied fingertips.
She lifted her gaze from her fingers to my face. “Ryder…” She hiccuped, her breaths fluttering in and out of her parted lips. “Y-you shot her.”
Yeah, but not fast enough. I knelt in front of her to block her view of the little boys’ bodies. Wet warmth seeped into the knee of my jeans. I holstered my gun and put two fingers on her throat, her skin clammy, her pulse weak and rapid. The bloodstain on her T-shirt spread fast.
I’d seen enough shock in the field to recognize it on Micheline: the vacant gaze, the light breathing, and the damp skin. The confusion. No Helsing reaper in her right mind would be surprised to have a necro shot off her; but how could anyone be in her right mind when she watched her mum go all Night of the Living Dead and kill her little brothers?
I rolled my jacket off my shoulders. Micheline and I had given death the finger more times than I could count. I wouldn’t let her die from a bite wound I hadn’t been fast enough to prevent.
“She’s dead,” Micheline said. “My mom’s dead.”
“I know, love. Stay with me, I’m going to fix you right up,” I said, using my hunting knife to slice my jacket into strips. If she didn’t get the H3 antinecrotics in the next twenty minutes or so, her chances of surviving the infection from the bite dropped to fifty percent. I can fix this, I told myself. I can save her.
Micheline grabbed me by the arm as I laid a strip of canvas on her wound. “The boys first,” she said, those blue eyes of hers glittering with dammed-up tears. “Help my brothers first.”
I looked away, unable to tell her there wasn’t enough of those boys left to help. I could deal with people dying; it was the crying that turned me chicken. ’Specially her. My girl could be stubborn as stone, but she wasn’t unbreakable.
“Ryder,” Micheline insisted, gripping my wrist tighter.
All I could do was shake my head. She’d know what it meant; she read my wordless gestures better than anyone. Her face crumpled. I wiped some of the gore off her cheek with my thumb, and then laid three more strips of fabric over her wound. I’d save her life first, and fix her heart later.
“Ethan?” Micheline asked in a small voice, calling for her brother. “Fletcher? Guys”—she hiccuped again—“it’s not funny, answer me.”
I tied two large strips around her chest and one under her arm to create some pressure, then took her left hand and clamped it over the makeshift bandage.
“Ethan?” she cried, louder this time. “Fletch?”
“Hold tight,” I said, scooping her off the floor. I edged out of the panic room, shielding her from the horror show. No need to stab a stake into the shreds of her heart.
“Oh God,” Micheline said as I carried her down the hall. She tried to look over my shoulder, but winced and gasped. “Oh God, she killed them, it’s my fault she killed them, I couldn’t stop her…”
“Shh, it’s not your fault,” I said.
“She killed them, she killed them…” Micheline repeated the words over and over again, down the stairs and through the foyer, her voice dying to a whisper. I clung to her, the last bit of home I had now. Her family took me in, gave me a place in a world that’d kicked me into the gutter and left me for dead.
Now Mrs. Helsing had a bullet from my gun in her skull. And as for the littlies … I’d never forget the sight of them limp and lost to us, not so long as I lived.
I kicked the front door open. Old man Helsing’s truck sat in the driveway, doors unlocked. I helped Micheline into the passenger seat. She stared straight ahead as I buckled her in, shaking, eyes unblinking. The sight of her could’ve broken my heart if I looked too long, so I didn’t spare her more than a glance.
I dashed around the truck’s hood and jumped in, but the keys weren’t in the visor. Or the center console. Or in the glove box, goddammit.
“Micheline, where are the keys?” I asked. If she heard me, she didn’t respond. Cursing, I sprinted back into the house. I searched through the foyer table drawers, knocking family pictures to the floor. The keys weren’t in the bloody kitchen, or in old man Helsing’s study. I hustled up the stairs double-time, thinking maybe he’d stashed them on his bedside table, and froze.
A small figure stood in the hall, outlined by the panic room’s light. Ethan wavered on unsteady legs, his right ankle bent at an angle. His head lolled on his tattered neck, blood gelling down the front of his shirt. He looked at me with the foggy eyes of the dead. It wasn’t right, freshies were supposed to take at least twenty minutes to turn. The kid hadn’t been dead more than three minutes, tops.
“Oh shit,” I said softly. “No, kiddo, not you, too.”
He snarled at me, his voice raspy, the vocal cords shredded. My hand shook as I took aim at his forehead. This trigger would fuck me up for real, fuck me up forever, but there was only one way to fix dead and mobile.
We both crumpled under the pressure of the trigger.
NOW
Jude and I don’t talk for the rest of the hunt, both of us bloody ruthless, both of us angry. My kills cool me off quick, but Jude throttles the steering wheel all the way back to the safe house, popping a couple of stitches in his shooting gloves.
When he finally parks in the drive, all his frustration explodes.
“Where was your head tonight, McCoy?” he snaps. “That necro
was inches”—he pinches the air between his thumb and index finger—“away from ripping my face open.”
I scrub my face with my palms—I can’t do this anymore, can’t bottle it in, can’t pretend like I’m stone cold when all I can think about is that kid and his mum. “I know, mate, I’m sorry.”
“‘Sorry’?” Jude asks. “Were you planning on telling me sorry while they stitched my face back together? For God’s sake, you looked like you were about to piss yourself out there.”
I tune out his bellowing, realizing I’d only disarm him with the truth. But it doesn’t matter what he thinks of me anymore, because all I want is for him to shut up, pull his head out of his arse, and realize I walked out of the big house alive but not unscathed.
The words slide out of me so easy, they take me by surprise: “I shot Ethan.”
Jude stops. Some of the red rage drains out of his face. He blinks. Breathes. “What?” he asks, his eyes narrowing to slits.
“That night … the kid turned, and fast,” I said, swallowing hard and looking straight ahead, out the window, anything to avoid Jude’s gaze. “Micheline, she … I’d already taken her outside. When I went back in for the car keys, I found the kid on his feet, his whole bloody throat ripped out and shit—” I shove my hands into my hair. I’d loved that kid, taught him to do proper cannonballs into the pool and to trap small game in the woods around the big house. “His head sounded like a melon when it hit the ground—hollow, y’know? How can I forget that? How can I ever get that out of my head?”
Jude’s silent for a long moment. When I look at him, he sniffs hard and swipes his upper lip with the back of his hand. The tendons in his jaw contract, relax, and contract again, as if he’s trying to stop himself from saying something thoughtless.
“Goddamn,” he finally says. His seat creaks as he leans back, and he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “This shitshow gets worse by the minute, doesn’t it?”
“Just wait till you see Micheline,” I said. “She dyed her hair black the other day.”
Jude scrunches his face up. “You didn’t tell her about Ethan, did you?”
“Hell no,” I say. “Do I look like a dumbarse?”
“I’d say you’re a jackass, but dumbass is an acceptable substitute.” He grins when I cuff him on the shoulder. “Get out of here, and tell Micheline I’ll see her later today.”
“You’d better damn well make good on that promise,” I say.
He rolls his eyes. “Get out, McCoy, before I decide to be pissed at you again.”
I kick my door open and jump out of the Humvee. Dawn’s graying the sky up a bit, and I jounce my shoulders to shake the night off. I feel … lighter, but not better. Everyone knows I shot Micheline’s mum to save her life; but hardly anyone knows I shot her little brother, too—just the coroners, investigators, old man Helsing, and now Jude. That’s it.
I find Micheline sitting on the marble floor in the foyer, resting her head on her knees. When she looks up at me, I do my best to keep my poker face. Dead easy for a reaper, even when her vibrant, peacock-feather blue eyes make me feel like the floor will fall out from under me. I might’ve saved her that night—the new tat on my arm and the ragged space in my chest’s proof enough of it—but how do you save a girl from her heartache?
Micheline pushes off the floor and runs to me, throwing her arms around my waist. She sniffles and shakes, but she’s still too proud or too stubborn to cry. This girl’s my Micheline and yet she’s not; this girl’s the one I’ve grown up with, the one I’d learned to shoot with, the one I’d sworn to protect with my life. She’s mine, and yet she isn’t; she’s alive, and yet something about her died back there with her mother and brothers, some part of her I couldn’t save. The thought makes me want to hit something. Hard. I want to make something bleed for it, even if that thing’s me.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, kicking the door closed behind me.
“Nothing,” she whispers. “Everything. Do you know what a fixer is, Ry?”
She’s talked a lot of nonsense over the past few days. I let her go, chucking her under the chin so she’ll look up at me. “A fixer? What are you talking about?”
“It’s the chemical I use to stabilize photographs after I expose them. A fixer removes the silver particles from—” But her eyes well up, and she presses the back of her hand against her mouth and nose, stopping up her tears. “At least I don’t look like her anymore. I don’t have to look in the mirror and see her dead face staring back at me.”
“Aw, Micheline.” I put my arms around her again. “Is that why you dyed your hair?”
She nods against my chest. “Does it look awful?”
“No, you’ve always looked badass in black.” I put my chin on the crown of her head, soaking up the fact that she’s said more than twenty coherent words in a row. “Everything’s a fixer now,” she says. “The dye. The black. You.”
Fixer.
Fix. Her.
Problem is, I don’t think I can. The best I can do is be here for her when she needs me, and hope that, someday, she picks up her exorcism cameras and Colts and rejoins our crew in the field. I have to believe she’s not so far gone.
“You stabilize me, Ry,” she whispers.
I hold her so tight, I hope I squeeze all her broken pieces back together.
UNSTOLEN
Jessica Brody
BY JESSICA BRODY
52 Reasons to Hate My Father
My Life Undecided
Karma Club
~ The Unremembered Trilogy ~
Unremembered
Unforgotten
Unchanged
~ The Unremembered Novellas ~
Undiscovered
Unleashed
Meet Jessica Brody
Writers like to say that inspiration is everywhere. You just have to let it hit you over the head like a coconut falling from a tree. I never actually believed this overly whimsical theory of creativity until it happened to me.
It wasn’t a literal coconut, but it was close enough.
I got the idea for the Unremembered trilogy while reading a newspaper a few years back. (For you younger readers, in case you don’t know, a newspaper is this thing that used to come to your door every morning before the invention of Twitter.) I wasn’t looking for a book idea—I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular—but a book idea is exactly what I found.
I read a headline that said, TEEN GIRL IS LONE SURVIVOR OF COMMERCIAL AIRLINE CRASH.
And the world stopped.
A teen girl survived a plane crash when no one else did?
How?
I proceeded to read the article, hoping to answer this very question. It provided no explanation beyond the all-encompassing, overly simplified rationale of “miracle.”
That wasn’t good enough for me.
I started asking myself questions. What-if kinds of questions. And anyone who knows me knows that when I start asking what-if questions, an outline of a new book idea is soon to follow. “What if she has total amnesia and doesn’t remember anything before the moment of the crash?” “What if she wasn’t on the passenger manifest?” (This question made me shiver.) “What if no one shows up to claim her, and her DNA and fingerprints aren’t in any databases?”
And then came the question that changed everything.
“What if the real reason she survived the plane crash is…”
Well, I can’t tell you that because that’s the ending of the first book.
Within thirty minutes of reading this article, I had a rough outline of an entire trilogy. A trilogy that all begins with a girl floating in the ocean, surrounded by plane wreckage, who can’t remember a thing.
It’s a sci-fi thriller with a little romance, a little mystery, and a lot of twists that I hope you won’t see coming.
The Unremembered trilogy (Unremembered, Unforgotten, and Unchanged) was my first foray into the world of science fiction. As an author of five previous con
temporary young adult titles including The Karma Club, My Life Undecided, and 52 Reasons to Hate My Father, writing science fiction was a challenge I’d always wanted to take on. Can I build my own world? Can I invent my own technology? Can I create an entire story around a speculative reality that may or may not ever happen?
The books are all written from the main character Seraphina’s point of view. I did this on purpose. I wanted you, the reader, to be just as lost and disoriented as she was. I didn’t want you to have any information that she didn’t have. I wanted you to discover her secrets and her past right along with her.
But after writing the first book, I was left with a feeling of longing. I wanted to know what happened when Seraphina wasn’t around. I wanted to explore this world without her in it, from someone else’s point of view. Someone who, maybe, is a bit more reliable of a narrator.
There’s a scene in the first book in which Zen, the mysterious boy who seems to follow Seraphina wherever she goes, shows her a tiny hard drive and explains that this is where he’s stored some of her lost memories.
“I stole them,” he tells her, “from the people who took them from you.”
Every time I read this scene as I was revising and proofing the book, this one line stood out to me. I pictured an Alias-esque spy-thriller-type scene in which Zen has to break into the top-secret research compound where Seraphina used to live and retrieve the stolen treasure, aka her memories.
I desperately wanted to write this scene. And I wanted to write it from Zen’s point of view. But what I found, as I dove into it, was that the heart of scene wasn’t really a spy thriller. Or some kind of great action-packed heist. It was more of an internal story. A small piece of chilling truth that Zen discovers about Seraphina’s past and how that one discovery shapes the rest of their journey together.
I hope you enjoy “Unstolen.”
You can read more about me and my books on my Web site, JessicaBrody.com. Or follow me on Twitter (@JessicaBrody), Instagram (@JessicaBrody) or Facebook (@JessicaBrodyFans), where I post an overwhelming amount of pictures of my four children who are very furry and often slobbery. (Spoiler alert: They’re actually dogs.)
