by JT Sawyer
Before he had made it to the door, he felt her presence in his mind. He hoped he would be spared hearing the voice of his twin sister Katherine, but it had only increased with each passing day since her return from China and after her subsequent death from the virus carried from those shores.
He remembered the anguish of watching her die hours after returning from the airport, one of millions who were ravaged by an invisible foe that cared not whether Roland was one of the most powerful and intellectually brilliant men on the planet.
Still, she died.
Roland had Katherine brought back to his estate when she was gravely ill and isolated inside the small medical clinic on the first floor, watching through the glass of the isolation chamber as the flicker of life trickled from her eyes at 12:04. He wept for what felt like an eternity, the psychic twinspeak between them severed, a part of his soul shredded. He thought of ending his own life, and had withdrawn the .38 from his safe, staring at it as if it might discharge by itself and do what he could not. Then, an hour later, Katherine’s voice cried out again from a deep abyss in his mind. The tone—the inflection—it was all so hypnotic, at once shockingly horrific but also pleasantly familiar as Katherine, or some part of his sister, reached into his thoughts, begging for help. Her lifeless body slowly began moving in the clinic. And even though she killed and consumed two nurses, he couldn’t bring himself to destroy her.
How could he? A part of her had returned to him and Roland knew that some prescient sliver of her was still alive. Was she even truly dead or just a host for this parasite? His sister, trapped in a parasite-riddled body beyond her control? It was then that he knew the dead were not truly gone. The parasite dwelling in her—controlling her and others with their rare blood cancer—had allowed, by accident or design, some part of the brain and personality to remain. At least that’s what he told himself as he felt Kat speaking to him from the clinic downstairs, as if she was standing next to him.
Perhaps there was still hope that she could be saved if a cure were found. But the nation, indeed the world, had already succumbed to the virus, and the experts that were usually at his disposal were dead or scattered.
Come to me—you don’t have to be alone any longer. Her voice whispered as if his sister were holding onto his arm. The mental connection they had always shared as twins had become amplified since Katherine had become reanimated after dying. Instead of shared impressions, he could hear her words inside his head, like she was whispering from the distant end of a lengthy tunnel. Throughout his life, Roland had always shared with Katherine an instinctive sense of her presence when they were in close geographic proximity, but since her body had been appropriated by the parasites, the sensation was magnified a thousand-fold, as if the tentacles of their combined beings were threading themselves through the fabric of his mind. It left him with a feeling that both terrified and elated him, as the echoes of Katherine’s soothing voice was juxtaposed by the commanding presence of something else lurking beneath it.
Roland forced his attention back to his sterile surroundings. He looked back at the den, grimacing at the sight of the elevated bed, the dialysis machine, and the nurse’s desk with all the bottles of prescription medications that his body had required to sustain his frail existence for so many decades. He thought about how more than half of his adult life had been spent tethered to this ornate prison cell as he tried to fight nature’s laws through the latest scientific advances or designer medications. Roland coughed, letting out a grimace as he swung his head away from the depressing clinical furnishings of his den. Despite all of his wealth, his resources, and global connections, the world’s most powerful elite was going to die alone in an icy mansion. My legacy gone. My sister something beyond recognition. Everything is lost.
Not gone—I am still here. Her voice called him as a faint shrill sound seemed to envelop her words.
He walked past the inoperable elevator and headed down the curved oaken staircase. The metallic sound of Katherine’s scratching wafted upward, as if the floor was an immense speaker. Roland paused after eight steps to catch his breath, trying to ignore the grating sound. He looked at the dapple of the sunlight as it filtered through the red-and-green stained-glass window above the main door below, marveling at the splendorous sight that he had witnessed thousands of times before. He reached one hand up, letting the warmth of the autumn rays catch on his furrowed fingers. He remembered the words of his father that had guided his life: If you want to shine like the sun then you must burn like the sun.
You will burn brightly if you come to me, Roland, said the piercing voice. He tried to force the noise away, but he found it impossible to resist her words.
He continued down the steps, taking another fifteen arduous minutes to descend twenty more steps until he was in the foyer. His shallow breath was bronchial, and he could see his fingernail beds were blue. He cursed his body as he forced each foot forward, his slippers dragging across the marbled floor.
Approaching the clinic, he removed a bronze key from his pocket and unlocked the heavy door. Roland’s eyes adjusted to the darkness as he headed inside the observation room and stood before the thick glass overlooking the medical bay where his sister had spent her last conscious moments. The scratching on the other side of the door stopped, and he pressed his face closer to the glass, peering around the edge. The sunlight filtering in from the hallway illuminated the interior beyond the glass enough for him to see the silhouette of Katherine moving to the right. Roland saw numerous bottles of shattered glass on the ground inside from when she had broken into the cabinet containing growth hormones and greedily consumed the clear liquid.
Be with me, brother—with us. Our kind needs you.
He let out a faint laugh that turned into a cough. “I’ve already spent a lifetime as a prisoner in my own body. I’d rather end things on my own terms than be at the mercy of another disease.”
I need you, Roland. This time it was the unmistakably clear sound of Katherine, the words coming to him in her girlish voice.
“Kat—is it really you?”
A shadow moved beyond the glass barrier, followed by the appearance of his sister, who slid before him, facing him squarely. Roland stepped back a foot, staring into the opaque face of Katherine, a blue surgical gown hanging off her lithe shoulders. He noticed her upright posture and clear gaze, her eyes still the same lovely jade color but replaced with a new intensity, as if a raging fire was burning behind them. He could see traces of blood around the corner of her mouth from when she had consumed the nurses. He knew he should have killed her then, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it any more than he was sure he could do it now.
The creature touched the glass, her spindly fingers fluttering along the surface as a shrill sound reached beyond the barrier between them. He was amazed at her musculature, the striations in her deltoids rippling as she moved her hand. How can she be dead? She looks far stronger than when she was alive.
Join us, my brother, and together we can command the lives of millions who need us. You will be as strong as I am and no longer bound by your weaknesses. Our kind will be the new rulers of this earth.
Roland couldn’t shake the honey-like presence of her voice. It was washing over his psyche, and he felt himself withdraw his fingers from the .38 as he reached up to the glass.
“Kat, you died because of me—I sent you on that business trip to China. It should have been me, but this old body…” He lowered his head, weeping.
“Let me help you, now. You have suffered for too long, my brother.” She spoke aloud this time, her lips fluttering while something just beyond her tongue seemed to undulate.
He looked up into her eyes, seeing that compassionate expression that she had always given him when he was so sick in his youth. Roland removed the pistol from his robe, patting it against his hip.
This is nothing to fear, Roland—it is the answer you have always been seeking. You can have a new life. Trust me.
He til
ted his head, staring at her, his swollen legs beginning to buckle as his heart struggled to function. All the years of his long life shot across the landscape of his weary mind, and he knew humanity, like his frail husk, was on the verge of annihilation. Whether the creatures ruled the world or the human race found a way to rebound, he didn’t care. All that mattered at the end of his life was finding peace with his sister and being able to do what was right for both of them.
He palmed the .38 and then pressed the red button on the wall, releasing the airlock on the door to the infirmary.
It hissed open.
Footsteps followed from the darkness.
Katherine floated around the corner, stopping three feet from Roland.
Roland saw something pulsating in the muscles in her neck. She raised one hand up, palm out. Roland no longer saw a predatory creature that had savagely killed others. He knew she could have raced forward and snapped his neck already. For some reason, nature has spared her the fate of the others outside.
She moved closer, and the gun in his hand quivered by his side. He raised it up towards his head. The creature moved quickly, sliding her fingers over the top of his. It was a gentle grip on the back of his hand as she slid the .38 down. She moved her fingers along his sweaty forehead, brushing a strand of gray hair away. He was transfixed by her eyes as he felt the constricting force of his depleted heart beat out its last rhythm.
“Is it really you, Kat?”
She stroked the side of his head, something ropelike slipping out from her lips as a shrill sound began flooding through his ears. He felt a thunderous movement of hair-like tendrils rippling through his flesh.
“Yes, and now we can finally be a family once more.”
Chapter 9
As they hid out in the lobby of the First of America Bank, Reisner glanced down at a blood-stained orange jumpsuit that was lying on the sidewalk outside. It looked like the person wearing it had been violently yanked from inside, and Reisner’s eyes followed a parallel row of crimson lines on the pavement as he recreated the violent encounter of the victim being dragged away. His head swung up when he heard the grating of metal along concrete again, and he knew that the creatures were dragging something immense to make that kind of noise.
He lowered his head, trying to clear his mind, then looked at his wristwatch. It was 1:14AM. He didn’t bother to look at the day—it wouldn’t have mattered. All that he cared about was the arrival of sunrise, because then it would only be another six hours or so later that the creatures would have to hole up to avoid the afternoon sun. Eleven hours never seemed so long. His mind drifted back to the kiss he and Selene had exchanged only hours ago. He could still smell the fragrance of her hair and feel the softness of her touch.
He looked around the room at the other weary men and wondered how long they could keep going at this pace. The battle in the alley had been costly in terms of ammo, and the sonic device on his vest had been damaged beyond repair. He hoped the sonic device Nash had left would hold out until midday.
Reisner leaned back against a desk, taking a water bottle from his pack and sipping a third of it while pouring a handful on his face to cool the burning wound on his cheek. Nash had already swabbed out the three parallel abrasions, which weren’t as deep as feared, but Reisner’s mind was still reeling from the violent assault and the odd absence of drones since that time. He knew the city was probably filled with millions of the creatures, and he wondered why the attack was staged in that alley. They could have swarmed us in the streets as we fled, but they withdrew instead.
“It’s been almost five hours. Ivins should have returned by now from the GoodWill,” said Nash, who was squatting beside the front teller’s counter, his vision focused on the sidewalk outside.
“Maybe the helo is having some issues,” said Porter in an unconvincing tone.
Reisner grit his teeth, letting out a sigh. “Or something went wrong—either something happened with the GoodWill or they’ve been routed elsewhere by Central Command.”
“To where?” said Nash.
“That’s the question of the day—or night.” He ran a hand through his hair, shoving his chin upward, forcing away the thought that the Blackhawk had suffered mechanical failure and gone down. With all that they had been through, he couldn’t bring himself to think that life could be any crueler. “We have to assume we’re on our own—maybe for good. We need to either find a way out of this city or link up with other friendlies to bolster our numbers until we can radio Central Command.”
“Who the fuck are you guys again?” said Blake. “I know you said you were attached to those Navy SEAL dudes I met earlier, but it sounds like this kind of stuff ain’t exactly new to you. You some kind of freelancers working for the government—or what we used to call a government?”
“Mmm, yes and no,” said Reisner, who let out a partial chuckle. “As my boss was always fond of saying, we’re just troubleshooters brought in to assess the fluidity of the situation at hand and provide a solution if necessary.”
Blake rubbed his chin, glancing up at all of them as he held his Glock pistol low near the floor where he was squatting. “Right.” He raised his eyebrows then shook his head. “Well, a solution to whatever is going on in the world would sure be nice, though not sure how much it would help now.”
“Like I said, we’re only troubleshooters. The real work in preventing the human race from plummeting further off the cliff is in the hands of someone else now—someone we all have a lot of faith in.” Reisner thought of Selene and the work she was hopefully about to undertake to study the virus further, as well as how people with different blood types were affected in unique ways. He hoped she could stem the tide before humanity slipped away any further and spent the rest of their days huddled in abandoned buildings like this one while the predators outside waited to pounce.
“There’s something that’s been bothering me since we arrived in this bank,” said Reisner, shifting his mental gears back to the earlier battle. “Like how we made it here alive—the alpha could have sent a thousand drones after us from every direction. Instead, she just sent that little party of Stormtroopers into the alley.”
Porter swiveled his head back towards Reisner. “I’ve been wondering the same thing—I think it was a test. She was probably watching how we attacked, what our team tactics or individual strategies were so she could file it away for later.”
“This is a fuckin’ mutant freak you’re talking about,” said Blake. “Not a chess player.”
“You’ve seen the way they move—it’s all very orchestrated,” said Reisner. “They attack with intention and focus, but she’s always the guiding hand.”
“Remember how they thwarted my attempt to get away in that vehicle I hotwired?” said Porter. “The alpha could have killed us there too, and she didn’t. Instead they just destroyed our ride.”
“She’s kept us here for a reason,” said Reisner. “I’m just not sure what it is yet.”
“When we were back at the NSA building after we first arrived here and got into that battle near the helo, the drones were sure as shit hell-bent on killing us,” said Nash. “Something’s changed since then.”
Reisner gave Nash a sideways glance while nodding. “Food, family, territory, or reproduction,” muttered Reisner. “Something Selene told me before in her lab on the Reagan—she said animals the world over are all driven by the same four primal impulses that enable the survival of their species.” He leaned forward, his eyes searching the space between the floor tiles as if probing into the ground below. “The drones could have killed us in the streets and devoured us, but they didn’t, so that rules out food, and the alpha sure as hell wasn’t interested in preserving her own tribe, given how many she was willing to expend in the alley and back at the NSA building. There’s no shortage of creatures in this city, given the former human population.”
“Then that leaves territory and reproduction, and we can probably—hopefully—rule out the latter,�
� said Porter.
“So she’s what—trying to branch out more around the city?” said Blake.
“Or it’s none of those, and she’s just using us as guinea pigs to see how we fight and learn from our weaknesses,” said Reisner. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this since I had that first encounter with the alpha on Jebwe Island in the Pacific and then had a look at the alpha that Ivins and I captured for Selene when we were attached to the Reagan.” Reisner leaned forward on his knees, his hands weaving a picture as he continued to speak. “Let’s say that the alpha here controls the drones for this region—her reach only extending so far—maybe a few miles or a few hundred miles, who knows. But what if she is in communication somehow with the other alphas?”
Nash, Porter, and Blake all careened their heads towards Reisner. “Then what she’s learning from us here gets transmitted to the other alphas and vice-versa,” said Nash. “Maybe that’s why this one seems so much smarter than the first one we saw on Jebwe Island—her experience base has increased from all the other alphas feeding information to each other. That would mean their knowledge of their enemies is increasing exponentially.”
“This is bullshit,” said Blake. “I mean, I hear what you’re sayin’ and all, but these are fucking animals that eat people.”
“Only certain people, while they capture others like you for the alphas to drain,” said Porter. “There’s a hierarchy to them, and the alphas, like that female out there, are becoming more successful predators with each encounter they survive with our species. The battles that are going on around our country—even around the world, maybe—are all being relayed through the alphas.” Porter stopped talking, his eyes widening at his own words. “Jesus.”