Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2)

by Samantha Durante

Just then a whoosh and a loud WHAP overhead broke them from their reverie. Isaac and Alessa both looked up, startled, and noticed that a skylight was hanging open – it had blown against the ceiling in the wind. Isaac realized this must have been the sound they’d heard earlier.

  He took her hand in both of his. “Listen, Less. I’m not gonna pretend I have any idea what’s going on. But you’re okay now, right?” She didn’t seem to be in pain anymore, but he wasn’t sure if she was ready to be alone, and he would have to leave her for a few minutes if he had any hope of finding answers. “I want to go look around that room for a bit. Are you okay to stay here for a couple minutes by yourself?”

  Alessa nodded, and flopped back against the floor, exhausted. He was still hesitant to leave her, but she seemed all right for the moment. He knew he couldn’t walk out of here without at least looking for some kind of explanation.

  He grabbed the flashlight and cautiously headed back into the darkened store. The air felt heavy in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but besides that nothing seemed amiss. He noted that all the clothing racks had been shoved to the side, and as he ventured further into the room, he understood why – this place had been retrofitted as a hospital.

  The center of the room held row after row of empty cots, most of them riddled with dark stains. Blood, he knew, from the virus – he tried unsuccessfully to shake off the memory of his sick parents bleeding their putrefied innards from their ears, their eyes, their mouths. It was a horrific way to go.

  And judging from the looks of things, hundreds – if not thousands – of people had met that same end in this very room.

  IV hooks hung ready in between the cots, empty bags sagging from their tips. Isaac pulled one down and held the light up to read the block letters printed on the plastic – narcotics. He tossed the empty bag on the nearest cot, wishing he’d had something to ease his own family’s suffering at the end.

  Turning, he made his way back toward the entrance to check on Alessa.

  He found her lying in the same spot he’d left her, but she looked more relaxed now, less shaken.

  “What’d you find?” she asked, sitting up.

  “It was a med center,” he replied. “I think that’s where they brought the sick people from this town.” He shook his head. “This place isn’t a refuge, Alessa. It’s a hospice.”

  Alessa shrugged. “I kind of figured that out already.”

  Isaac sighed and sat down next to her. “I don’t understand how, Alessa. I mean – I believe you – it’s clear that a lot of people died in there. And you seem to somehow have felt their thoughts, what they went through. But I don’t understand how. Nothing like this ever happened to you before, right?”

  Alessa laughed. “Don’t you think it would have come up if I had some kind of psychic powers? ‘Oh, by the way, I see dead people.’” She sighed.

  Isaac sat back, leaning his palms against the floor behind him. It just didn’t make any sense. How would Alessa just suddenly develop the ability to feel the thoughts of someone who’d died? Besides what the producers had rigged for her on the drama, she’d never even seen a ghost before, and that was all totally fake anyway.

  But then again, it was real to her at the time, wasn’t it?

  A thought occurred to Isaac, his jaw going slack at the possibility. He sat up and reached for her hand. “Alessa – maybe this isn’t totally new. I mean, the producers were messing around in your head when they programmed the stitch, right? So what if they, I don’t know, somehow knocked something loose… and then when you saw the ‘ghost,’ it unleashed some ability that was locked away inside?”

  Alessa raised an eyebrow. “Explain that?”

  Isaac jumped to his feet, his hands clasped in front of him as he paced back and forth, reasoning out his hypothesis. “They always say that we use so little of our brains, that there are whole sections of it that no one has any idea what they’re even for, right?”

  “Right…”

  “Well, what if some of those unknown sections contain extrasensory abilities that we just don’t know how to use? What if seeing a ‘ghost’ basically trained your mind to use those abilities?”

  Alessa reached for his palms and pulled herself up, though she still didn’t look convinced. “So you’re saying that what happened on the drama basically tricked my mind into unlocking some long lost ability to feel the emotions of dead people.”

  Isaac squeezed Alessa’s hands. “I know it sounds crazy. But you can’t deny what just happened – what’s been happening to you ever since we left Paragon. Whenever we go somewhere that people have died – or died tragically at least, from the virus – you’re feeling things you shouldn’t be able to feel.”

  Alessa considered for a moment. “What about the woods, though? And the beasts? How do they fit into this?”

  That was a good question. “I’m not sure,” Isaac replied. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with them at all. Maybe we just misattributed what you felt since it seemed like that could have been the only source at the time. But who knows? People could have died all over those woods, right? Maybe the creatures really were just wolves or something, and what you were feeling was totally separate.”

  She looked skeptical. “Wolves with human footprints?”

  “I don’t know, Alessa! I’m trying here – I need more time to figure that part out.”

  “Okay, okay,” she replied. “Thank you for trying to come up with an explanation. I just don’t understand how this could be possible.”

  “Well, think about it,” Isaac reasoned. “In order for the producers to get all those new memories in your head, your brain has to be in this open, impressionable state, right? So maybe it’s still recovering from that state, and then you see what you think is a ghost, and some distant part of your brain is like, ‘Oh, I know how this works,’ and just kicks in. And then every time you saw a ‘ghost’ after that, it was like building a muscle – getting that part of your brain stronger and stronger until finally it’s able to do it without you even trying.”

  Alessa nodded her head, thinking. “Fake it ‘til you make it?”

  “Exactly!” Isaac continued. “And then we’re out here –” he gestured with his arms at the expanse of the world, “– where so many people died of this terrible virus… and you’re just picking up on their presence or something, because you inadvertently trained your brain to tune into this other frequency that we normally can’t perceive. Like how a dog can hear different sounds than a person – just because you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it’s not there. So just because I can’t see these ghosts, or whatever you’re seeing, doesn’t mean they’re not there – I’m just not equipped to sense them like you are.”

  “But wait a minute,” Alessa interjected. “You were seeing my ‘ghost’ during the drama, too. So why didn’t you develop this ability as well?”

  Isaac thought for a moment. “Well, everyone has natural inclinations, things that we’re better at than others. I’ve never really been intuitive, not like you. You’ve always been empathetic, very good at reading people. Maybe this is just an extension of that, only you’re doing it with dead people now,” he shrugged.

  Alessa considered. “Okay, I see where you’re going with this. I guess it kind of makes sense. It’s better than no explanation, at least.”

  Isaac was fairly pleased at his revelation, but one thing was still nagging at him – the creatures. That was the one piece that didn’t quite fit with his neat explanation that Alessa was somehow connecting with the dead. Alessa had seemed to think that she was feeling the creature’s emotions, but those beasts were – unfortunately for Isaac and Alessa – clearly very much alive.

  He’d have to give this some more thought.

  Alessa let out a loud sigh. “What if those things – those beasts – had been waiting in there for us? We would have been sitting ducks, me balled on the floor like that.” She shook her head in frustration.

  “I’ll keep y
ou safe, Alessa, I promise. The next time it happens, you just concentrate on getting through what’s going on in your head, and I’ll take care of everything else.” He squeezed her hand. “We’ll get through this together, okay?”

  Alessa nodded. She looked drained. “I just want to find this base for Regina and go home. I need Janie.”

  “I know,” Isaac soothed.

  “Do you think this could work? This mall?” she asked, her voice small.

  Isaac shook his head. “I don’t know, Less. It’s kind of out in the open. It wouldn’t be easy to come and go unnoticed, if anyone was looking for us.” Not to mention what that room had just done to her – Isaac wasn’t eager to repeat that episode anytime soon.

  Alessa sighed. “I’m just so tired of running, Isaac. From Paragon, from the creatures, now from this. And the virus, too. It’s a miracle neither of us have gotten sick.”

  Isaac nodded – he’d been harboring worries about that, too. It’d been quite a few years since the outbreak, but there wasn’t much known about how this virus behaved in the long-term. Could it still be viable out here, even without any living hosts to carry it? He probably should have been more careful not to touch anything in that medical center…

  And as that very thought occurred to Isaac, he was overcome with the powerful urge to sneeze. A thick dollop of phlegm cleared his throat in the ensuing rush of air as a shroud of fatigue settled over his body.

  Recovering from the sneeze, Isaac looked up at Alessa, the same sheer terror he felt staring back at him from her eyes.

  Isaac’s heart dropped into his gut, and he realized in that moment what a terrible mistake he’d made.

  14. CHRONICLES

  “Nikhil – how’d you end up here?” 14 had asked.

  Nikhil stretched his legs out in front of him on the cold cement floor and rested his head against the thick metal door of his cell. He let the note drop to the floor in the sliver of light by the crack and watched the swirling dust above it with half-closed eyes. He’d need to think for a minute before he could answer.

  They’d spent so much time the past couple days dissecting their time at ESU that Nikhil had almost begun to forget that wasn’t his real life. The problem was that he had trouble remembering what was.

  Finally, he reached to the far side of the door and rolled the tip of his pen across the hinge to refresh the “ink” on his makeshift pen. He curled over the shaft of light illuminating the note and scratched his reply. “Not sure,” he admitted.

  14 didn’t seem satisfied with that response. “After the outbreak – you came with family?”

  The outbreak – that helped.

  “With friends,” he replied. He remembered being on a camping trip with buddies from high school, celebrating their recent graduation. They’d gone backpacking for the summer to commemorate their newfound freedom. Sitting around the fire one night, he distinctly recalled the crackle of the radio and the blare of an emergency broadcast signal.

  By that point, if he remembered correctly, their cell phone batteries had been long dead and they were tens of miles from civilization, so they’d had no way to contact their families and find out if they were all right. By the time they’d blazed a trail out of the woods weeks later, the world was in chaos.

  “Couldn’t get home,” he elaborated. “Headed to the quarantine zone instead.” There had been plenty of people traveling that direction, and they’d been lucky enough to find some friendly strangers to give them a ride.

  Tragically, Nikhil’s three friends had come down with the virus along the way, so by the time he’d shown up at the gates, Nikhil had been truly on his own.

  “Which unit were you in?” 14 asked.

  “97 – the old library. You?”

  “63, the middle school.”

  Nikhil couldn’t believe how much of this was coming back to him. He remembered now that there’d been a disproportionate number of the 100 or so efficiency units assigned to people in their teens and twenties – it seemed that the virus had favored – or rather, not favored – older adults and the very young.

  But with over a thousand people in his unit alone, there hadn’t been much time to get to know the others his age. Within days of arriving he’d been assigned a series of demanding work shifts assisting with the construction of the walls around the compound, and it’d been all he could do just to make it to the right bed in his crowded dormitory before passing out each night. Even if he and 14 had been in the same unit, it’s unlikely he would have known who she was.

  “You come with family?” he scratched onto the note.

  Evasive as usual, she disregarded his question and instead asked another of her own. “How’d you get caught?”

  That one was harder to answer. Nikhil wasn’t even sure how many years he’d been in the prison now…

  He sent back a single question mark as his response.

  But 14 persisted. “Were you a rebel?”

  “No,” he wrote. He knew he hadn’t heard of the rebellion before the prison.

  14 tried another angle. “Before or after the dramas?”

  Nikhil considered. He knew he’d been on quite a few different shows since he came to the prison, but did he remember ever seeing them before that?

  Yes – he did remember. Actually, that was the reason he had gotten into trouble to begin with. For some reason he’d felt out of it when reporting to a work shift stocking supplies at the medical center, and all he could think about was the cliffhanger season finale of a new show – the very first one in the few years since he’d come to Paragon – that had aired the night before. Lost in his own thoughts, he’d somehow stumbled into a restricted area – his mind flashed back to a vision of screaming patients being injected with something by official-looking doctors. Before he could even process what he’d seen, he’d been whisked off and dumped in a bar-lined cell. And he never did find out what happened on the next season of that show, either.

  “Just after Season 1,” he replied.

  14’s note came back quickly. “That was ~5 years ago.”

  Five years? Wow. Nikhil couldn’t believe how much time had gone by. The years had really bled together in his head. He could barely recall any event to distinguish one year from the next, except for the dramas, of course – though he didn’t know which order they’d happened in. He felt cheated.

  “What have I missed?” He almost didn’t want to know.

  14 sent back a fresh scrap of paper.

  “Not much. Work, new drama every few months. ‘Happy’ drugs in the food.” Drugs. Nikhil wondered if that was why he’d felt so confused the day he got lost in the medical center. He did remember having a big lunch that afternoon.

  Her note continued, “Secret leaders with secret plans, resources wasted, people abused. Rebels fighting. It’s rough.”

  Rough sounded like an understatement. “What kind of abuses?” he asked.

  Her reply came slowly, like she was hesitant to share. Nikhil wondered if he’d somehow struck a nerve.

  “Constant hard labor. Withholding food. People disappear sometimes, like you. Secret ring of forced concubines…”

  Wow. As much as he hated not having control over his own life, a part of Nikhil wondered if he was better off as he was. At least when he was on the dramas, he could forget about all this – he got to live in the moment, to feel some modicum of influence over his fate. Even if he realized after that it was all a lie, it still felt good at the time.

  Being incarcerated was miserable, but the parts in between usually weren’t so bad.

  “What will the rebels do?” he asked. He still didn’t know much about their objectives, besides what little he’d been able to wrangle from 14.

  “Set us free,” she responded simply.

  Free. It’d been a long time since that had really meant anything to Nikhil – maybe not since that ill-fated backpacking trip before all this had started.

  Free.

  No, his last attempt at freedom
hadn’t turned out so good. Hopefully whatever these rebels of 14’s offered would be an improvement. Then again, he supposed it couldn’t get much worse.

  15. TURMOIL

  “Good afternoon, Phoenix. How are you feeling today?”

  Phoenix regarded the trim silver-haired man in her doorway for a moment before responding. Was this another of the Engineers come to call?

  “Fine, thank you.” Her voice was hoarse, but sure. In the past day or so, she’d finally mustered enough strength to stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time, and bits and pieces of her past – the war, faces she didn’t recognize, the stoning – had started coming back to her. She was eager to take this opportunity to learn more.

  He smiled tightly and shuffled into the room. His manner was more severe, more clinical than her last visitor. She noticed that he stood peering out the window instead of sidling up to her in the visitor’s chair as the others had done.

  “It’s a beautiful day out there, you know.” His fingers pulled on the shuttered blinds as he gazed beyond the glass.

  Phoenix could see the sun streaming around the periphery of the blinds, but bright light still sent shooting pains through her head, so she’d asked the nurses to keep them closed. She pulled her arms to her side and pressed herself up into a sitting position with some effort. “So it is,” she croaked.

  He dropped his hands from the blinds and slid them into the pockets of his long white coat as he turned to face her. He didn’t seem much for small talk, which was just fine by Phoenix – she was hoping for answers. “Well, let’s get down to it, shall we? How much do you remember about the war?”

  She remembered there being a war. But not any of the specifics. “Not much,” she replied truthfully.

  “Then let’s start at the beginning,” he began. “You would have been young – only a child when we were drawn into the global conflict that’d been raging around us for decades.”

  Phoenix searched her mind for memories of her childhood, but came up empty-handed.

  “In the century leading up to our time, world population had exploded. Competition over resources became fierce, stronger countries invaded weaker ones, atrocities were committed. Many nations fell into a pattern of war. Does this sound familiar to you?”