The atmosphere is full of death.
As is this mountainside, and the city below. And as she pushes out another blast of energy, she sees the shockwave begin to reverberate against some kind of distant perimeter, far away, some kind of barrier, and it’s at that moment—somewhere at the back of her awareness—that she comes to a startling realization. It’s as if she barely has the capacity to acknowledge it. But in that moment she knows that the world will survive.
She never considered the possibility.
The strangers never let her see it.
The edge.
She turns, wobbly on the corrugated floor, and lets the realization stun her and bring her back to herself.
“It’s over,” she says aloud, but she can’t hear her voice. She repeats the words, louder. “It’s over.”
Joel stares upward with open-mouthed awe as the pulsing throat continues its collapse, breaking into ash and smoke. The structured column of energy and crimson light is almost completely gone, giving way to a blackness dotted with stars. Ash drifts down like gray snow.
“Holy shit, lady,” he says, still staring upward. “You did it. You fucking did it.”
“I need to go over there,” she says again, and finally Joel looks down at her, sees the black trail of ash and tears down her face. She lifts a weary arm to point up the mountain face as the hands of the survivors gradually let her go. The human beings in the back of the old truck shift as if waking from a long slumber.
“Why?” Joel asks.
“My friend is up there,” she says.
“This truck won’t make it up there.”
“Come with me?” Felicia says. “Please?”
Joel takes a moment to watch the side of the mountain, the thousands of humans in twisted agony, calling for help, and Felicia can sense he’s at a loss. How can one man, or even the five of six exhausted survivors in this truck, make any difference at all in the face of all that? Then he gives voice to it.
“What do we do?”
“We can help them.”
“How? How on Earth can we help them?”
“We’re out of everything,” Zoe reminds them, swallowing, returning to full awareness. Her own eyes are wet, and her cheeks are streaked black with ash. “They’re dying.”
“The radio,” Felicia says.
She senses it crackling to life, and she understands now that the strangers had been blocking the communication for hours. Even that, they had controlled and stopped.
Joel looks at her quizzically, and at that moment Rachel staggers out of the truck, two-way radio in her fist. A familiar voice is stuttering over the speaker, quick-paced words that are unintelligible under the din coming from the mountain face.
“Kevin’s on the radio!” Rachel calls. “He says people are alive!”
“What?”
“He’s barely coming through, but they’re finding people.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure, but I think he said Sterling.” She’s staring all around, in disbelief that the nightmare is actually coming to an end. “He’s breaking up.”
“That’s it? They only made it that far east?”
“I think that’s the edge of it,” Felicia says.
“The edge of what?” Joel says, his head snapping toward her.
“The edge of everything.”
“But this thing …” Joel says, then stops. “Wait.”
Rachel watches him come to the same realization she has come to. Felicia can see it in Rachel’s mind as well as Joel’s: the awareness expanding from their first moments under the sway of the infestation, the belief—fed to them psychically?—that the phenomenon was worldwide, that all observable evidence pointed to the conclusion that the alien infection gripped the entire planet and not merely a section of it. Felicia grasps only a vague sense of this, as if her own mind is only now opening to the possibility.
Had Kevin and Mai’s crew come upon an actual barrier? A forcefield of some kind? Had they found people looking at them from the other side? People observing the invasion from the outside but unable to interfere?
Static continues to pour from the radio, with only snippets of Kevin’s voice coming through. Rachel tries to connect with him, repeatedly, but Felicia can no longer wait. She has to go.
“Help is coming,” Felicia says. She can sense emergency response gathering at the perimeter. “Now please take me up there.”
She begins to climb down from the truck bed, but Philip won’t let go his grip. Felicia kneels and touches him warmly.
“It’s finished,” she says to the boy. “You did wonderfully.”
He peers up at her, his wet eyes innocent and pure. He smiles at her. She knows he will be fine. Philip relaxes his grip and turns to the two women at his level. Both Linda and Julia are returning his tentative smile, weary and wracked with pain but finally—impossibly—optimistic.
Joel and the twins hop down to the ground, still keeping a wary eye on the surroundings.
“Is it really over?” Chloe asks, but no one answers.
The hills are still agitated with misery, and it seems very far from over. But as the survivors take turns gazing into the sky, they know that at least the worst is behind them. As dawn approaches, brightening the eastern horizon with muted fire, the phenomenon above them continues to dissolve into ash clouds and diminishing crackles of otherworldly electricity. The alien threat is gone, perhaps slain.
Is it possible?
They will survive.
“You won’t need those,” Felicia says.
The twins look at the weapons in their grips as if they don’t make sense, then stow them in the truck bed. They blink and cough, and then begin to hastily stockpile morphine syringes in their boxes, as much as they can carry.
“You go, I’ll stay with Kayla,” says Rachel. “And Kevin!”
Felicia begins running and stumbling away from the truck, toward the mass of bodies in the trees. Nicole is up there, less than an eighth of a mile up the slope, the image is so clear it’s as if she has binoculars trained on the spot. Resolute now, she races past twisted bodies into the trampled wildflowers leading to the forest’s edge. It’s old-growth pine mixed with Aspen—ponderosa pine and blue spruce, lodge pole pine and white fir. The strangers were after it all, and something in particular about this area. What was it? She can’t see it clearly at the moment, doesn’t care to, but increased awareness of the alien objective is possible only now that they’re gone, and Felicia doesn’t know why. Did they withhold information from their human hosts?
She shakes her head away from all that, and makes her way past the larger conglomerations of bodies. Approximately half are already dead, and the other half are writhing on the ground, teeth gritted, muscles thrashed, bones broken, joints blasted. Uniformly, their mouths and faces are scarred and bleeding and slathered with splinters and sap. The landscape is a deafening chorus of agony.
“Be careful!” Joel calls from twenty feet behind her, his voice nearly drowned out.
Felicia pays no heed.
The twins have slowed, wandering through the first of the screaming victims, trying to find the worst off so that they can administer what little pain relief they have. Immediately, they are kneeling next to two separate bodies. Two of thousands.
Their mindscapes fade behind Felicia’s progress.
Nicole.
She’s closer now.
Felicia weaves through the tapestry of human misery, the screams raining against her ears.
She can sense them watching her, knowing who she is, registering her passing even as they persevere through hideous injury.
It’s her!
Felicia stagger-runs, gasping, her own injuries complaining, but she presses on. New tears stream down her face, not only in anticipation of her finding her lover but also in recognition of those in need whom she is passing without even acknowledging.
Surrounding her in all directions, pine trees have been gnawed into their deep s
apwood layer. Every tree is surrounded by mounds of sticky, bloody sap and masticated bark and cambium. Next to each pile lay countless bodies screaming through horribly injured mouths, teeth cracked and gone, tongues swollen and torn, lips thrashed beyond repair.
Nicole’s soul rears up bright and wounded in her mind’s eye, and then Felicia is upon her, zeroing in. She stops, panting, searching all around. Misery everywhere.
Where is she?
Then a familiar birthmark on a naked, ruined shoulder.
A butterfly.
Nicole is curled up, face clenched. She is obliterated, her bones broken, her naked flesh ripped. She’s convulsing and coughing.
No.
Felicia bends to her, places her hand on the hot, bleeding skin. The skin she has loved.
Nicole is still unclothed from sleep. She never had the chance to wake up to humanity and dress herself and enjoy another second of life. She is shaking uncontrollably, but she reacts to Felicia’s touch, knowing it’s her. Nicole’s wet, sap-encrusted eyes meet hers, but they are mostly unfocused, unseeing. Their bond has become inner.
Outwardly, Nicole is whimpering in her failing human shell, bleeding out from all kinds of horrific wounds. But the two of them share a flood of imagery, most strongly at the point where Felicia touches Nicole’s unblemished skin—at the upper arm where the butterfly tattoo remains, bright and hopeful; at her back, where the vertebrae are red and inflamed; and at her stomach, where Nicole’s belly button trembles beneath shallow breaths. The touch is hot, feverish from the body’s immune system shifting into useless overdrive but also from the rush of sensory memory. Felicia’s fingertips burn.
—You found me! —
—I found you—
—I knew you would—
Felicia carefully embraces her lover, knowing exactly where not to touch her. She knows Nicole’s body as if it is her own, and the knowledge brings a flood of new tears.
She will not be able to save her.
—and they’re back to the moment they met on campus, their paths crossing at a moment of pure chance, Felicia new to the school from California and Nicole also new but offering help as a Fort Collins native, filling her in on the best hot spots, the best local brews, the best hikes in the area, and making a casual date the next day at Starry Night to share more tips, and by the end of that tea on College Avenue, knowing that one thing was going to lead to another, and the tightness and rightness in the pit of the stomach at the prospect of the immediate future, and as the summer days wore on, fitting together like puzzle pieces in more ways than the physical, and Felicia’s reluctance to move to northern Colorado evaporating like moisture at high altitude, and—
Nicole begins to shudder more violently, and Chloe is already there at her side, preparing a syringe with a full dose of morphine, but Nicole is laboriously shaking her head, and Felicia waves Chloe away.
“Are you sure?”
Felicia nods, and Chloe hurries away.
—and the memories begin to thin and weave like tendrils between them, like strands of DNA, and Felicia can smell Nicole’s essence within the memories, and even as the body flatlines, the soul remains under Felicia’s touch, moving into her through her fingertips, and Felicia feels a wave of pure love envelop her—
Nicole’s body goes limp against Felicia’s breast, but Felicia hardly notices. The mountainside and the survivors fade into nothingness, and all she knows is that Nicole’s essence remains inside her, alive and soaring, and she holds on to it tightly, not wanting to let it go.
“Felicia,” comes a voice.
As in a dream, Nicole begins to drift inside their psychic connection, ethereally, and Felicia is amazed to find that rather than dissipating outward, Nicole is moving deeper inside Felicia, becoming a part of her, and she has never felt anything like it in all her time on this planet. It’s both sensual and spiritual, beyond anything earthbound, and despite the scale of death and suffering all around her, Felicia can’t help but erupt in beatific laughter, if only for a moment, as Nicole nests in the deepest part of her.
“Felicia!” says Joel, louder.
She opens her eyes, still clutching Nicole’s corpse.
“She’s gone,” he says.
Felicia shakes her head, gently sets her lover’s body to the soft earth.
“No, she’s not.”
She turns away from the horror of Nicole’s body to find Julia approaching, carrying Philip, and Linda bringing up the rear, limping but healing quickly somehow, much more quickly than Felicia herself did at the library. Felicia takes only a moment to marvel over the boy’s quick recovery before she sees it with her own eyes: Most of the bodies around them are succumbing and their souls are drifting toward them, ghostly apparitions floating in the pre-dawn and merging with Linda, or Julia, or Philip, or Felicia, it doesn’t matter, and Felicia senses all of them, absorbs their life stories, their memories, their passions, and they become a part of her, and to Felicia it’s the most enriching sensation she’s ever known. Whereas this alien notion of a web of souls frightened her, it is now an expression of humanity that is more human than anything she’s experienced.
The mountainside is alive with wandering souls.
“It’s beautiful!” she cries.
She can feel Joel staring at her, incredulous, but it only barely registers in her consciousness. Perhaps someday he’ll understand what has happened.
Felicia is not sure how much later they all hear the chopping blades of three military helicopters approaching the site. Time seems to bend and stretch. But soon the urgent machines are sweeping in from the brightening east, and Joel is racing down the ruined mountainside, into the clearing, to wave them in. But Rachel is already down there at the road’s edge, Kayla right alongside her, anchored to her side, and they are both waving their arms in thankful arcs, and Felicia can read the enormous rushes of relief in both their minds as the wind from the great metal blades blast their weary faces, which are laughing and happy despite the crushing death in their midst, as if they too know what is becoming of the infected souls.
Joel arrives at the road’s edge, and without hesitation, before the copters land, he embraces Rachel, lifting her into the air, and they kiss and laugh, and Kayla hugs both of them in turn, dancing around them, and Felicia suddenly has a glimpse of their future together as a makeshift family, and although the glimpse is one of deserved joy, a slow sadness takes hold of her.
At that moment, way down below, Rachel drops from Joel’s embrace and spins, searching for Felicia among the wounded trees—almost as if she has heard her thoughts—and she finds her, and Rachel’s expression also becomes one of sorrow, and Felicia smiles warmly for her.
The helicopters land on the road some distance from the truck, and five armed men jump from each one, approaching Rachel and Joel. They are animated in their gestures, shouting at them as Joel responds, nodding. Rachel begins to gesture toward the mountainside, beckoning Felicia and the others to return to the road, and Felicia looks away, toward the bruised dawn, where—in the distance—more helicopters are approaching, medical helicopters from the looks of them, their blades making spirals of the lingering smoke.
She realizes that she, Julia, Linda, and the boy—those who returned—are the only ones experiencing or even seeing the absorption of souls. She is overwhelmed by the voices and personalities and lifeforces that are being released from their human forms and finding homes inside her, shrinking to an essence and nestling in the deep dark, becoming part of her.
With a start, she recognizes that although most of the human beings are giving in to their injuries, some are not. She can see these bright souls, still shining but suffering.
She can identify them.
Felicia grabs Zoe’s hand, then Chloe’s, and she drags them from new survivor to new survivor.
“This is Joanie, she’ll make it, help her,” she instructs Zoe, who hastily prepares one of the few syringes remaining, administers the medicine, then tells Chloe t
o run down to the truck and get bandages for open wounds.
Joanie the divorced schoolteacher, trembling, looks into Felicia’s eyes.
—Thank you!—
Thirty feet away is Herb, a real estate broker with four kids and a beautiful wife who succumbed to the infection, and he is choking on his own blood. Zoe turns him over, and Herb coughs out the worst of it, then inhales wretchedly. In seconds, he is breathing easier under the warmth of morphine, but he is still bleeding from slashed gums and the open maws of lost teeth. The man is weeping softly, but Felicia hears his words flow over her.
—You did it, you’re the one, thank you, thank you—
And she’s shaking her head, No, not only me, and sparing another glance at the survivors at the road’s edge, she moves on to the next body, a young woman named Tricia, whose confused thoughts center on her boyfriend Trent, whom Felicia knows is lying on a patch of ground north of Hughes Stadium, dying at this very moment.
Then Lawrence, an older man in shredded biking attire, his helmet still attached to his head and possibly the thing that kept him alive.
And on and on like that until the mountainside is buzzing with military and medical activity, blue triage and trauma tents set up as far as the eye can see, Felicia and the others leading the first responders to the bodies that have the best chance to survive. Death is still rolling across the mountainside, but there are new survivors among them, and at first the responders are mystified and suspicious about Felicia’s ability to direct them to the bodies most in need, but before long they are relying on her—as well as Julia and Linda, and even Philip—to find those bodies.
Act now, ask questions later is the ruling philosophy.
But there are untold thousands of people to wade through, and an increasing number are corpses. As souls continue to drift toward Felicia, the responders are beside themselves with panic and disbelief.
“What happened here?!” shouts a young National Guardsman based out of Kansas who has dealt with emergency scenarios only in simulations. He has repeated the phrase three times as he has moved from body to mutilated body, helping to enumerate them lower down near the road. An Army contingent is already in sparse command there, leading the endeavor.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 30